Maureen Gibbon
This spring I'm wearing two new favorite perfumes: Laura Tonatto's Oltre and Diptyque's L'Eau. I should clarify that neither of these perfumes is a new release; Oltre came out in 2002 and L'Eau has been around since 1968. But they are new to me.
Laura Tonatto's Oltre is often described as a sea scent, and Tonatto's own website offers this imagery: "A breath of the ocean. In front of the endless expanse of water, Alexander the Great closed his eyes, bowed his head slightly and wept. His fate, glory and dreams behind him. Before him only the sea."
I know it's a fashion in perfume writing to describe the scene a fragrance invokes. I often see that kind of description used in perfume reviews or on designer's websites, and at first I thought the words were applied to a fragrance after it was created. However, according to Chandler Burr's The Perfect Scent, that kind of descriptive writing is often present at the very start of fragrance's creation in something called a brief.
A brief is an attempt to put a fragrance into words -- or into some other medium, since Burr says, "Briefs can be videotapes, songs, paintings."
I'm comfortable enough calling Laura Tonatto's Oltre a sea scent, but if someone asked me to write a "brief" for the fragrance, I'd say:
- It's standing under the pines beside the waterfall at Sweet Arrow Lake. It's jumping off the top of the waterfall into the black pool at the base. It's the tiny room behind the fall, between the water and the rocks, where there's just room to stand.
- It's the pure, cool water smell of my cotton nightgowns after they dry on the clothesline.
- It's the smell of water itself.
Officially, Oltre is a combination of "coastal pine, lily of the valley, seaweed and musk." I can definitely detect the top note of pine, but after that I just go into a dreamy state. I'm not surprised that I like a fragrance with lily of the valley and musk in it, though. I love Diorissimo and a wide variety of musks.
Now, despite its name, Diptyque's L'Eau doesn't smell at all like water. It's a crazy spice of clove and carnation, citrus, and something delicate and white -- all at the same time.
Perfumes: The Guide gave L'Eau four stars and described it as "newfangled old-fashioned" because it's based on a 16th century potpourri and clove pomander. I don't disagree. When I wear it, I feel some odd connection to an earlier time, but that doesn't mean it's out of date. To say that L'Eau is out of date would be like saying oranges or the color red are out of date. L'Eau feels absolutely vibrant.
I'll go one step further on L'Eau: I need this scent in my life. It sustains me through the day.
According to the perfume website Basenotes, the official fragrance notes of L'Eau are cloves, geranium, sandalwood, rose, and cloves. Some people on Basenotes insulted L'Eau by calling it a clove bomb, or stating that it should be used only at Christmas or as a room spray. Tant pis.
You can buy both Oltre and L'Eau at Luscious Cargo, the only place I found online that carried both scents. Luscious Cargo also sends along generous samples.
Winter 2009: Right now my favorite perfumes are Montale's Embruns d'Essaouira and Iroaz by Lostmarc'h. I wear one of them almost every day.
Embruns d'Essaouira is a spiced, musky sandalwood scent that also contains a note of iodine "from the water of Essaouira." I don't know why the iodine is so appealing but it really makes the perfume for me. There's a saltiness there that's unlike any other marine or salt fragrance I've tried, including Acqua di Parma Marina Quercia.
Iroaz is a salty rose scent, or a marine rose. It seems right for nearly every day. It's floral without being sweet -- a sharp, thorny rose. It's made in Rennes, in Brittany, south of Saint-Malo. When I wear it I really do think of the time I spent on Île de Groix, walking all over the island and wading in the cold Atlantic water.
Suzanne, the main character in my new novel Thief, also likes rose perfume. She wears Yves Saint Laurent's Paris and describes it as "sweet chemical rose."
YSL just released Parisienne, which is described as having three notes: damask rose, sandalwood, and blackberry. Hmm. I haven't smelled it yet, but I want to see what's giving Kate Moss so much pleasure in commercials for the perfume.
If a pink carnation was the only flower Don McLean’s “lonely teenage broncing buck” had in “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” there was a good reason he was out of luck.
The pompom-like flowers made up almost every corsage I ever got in high school, and their clammy blossoms were about as appealing as their straight-from-the-refrigerator temperature. Still, every time I received a carnation, I’d stick my nose into it, hoping for a scent. Each time the petals disappointed.
Knowing all that, it’s hard to explain why I picked up a bottle of Caswell-Massey’s Carnation in at tiny perfumery in 1990. Maybe it was the heart-shaped bottle, or maybe the artful and old-fashioned graphics did it – I don’t know. I do know that when I got that spicy sweetness in my nose, I realized how wrong I’d been about the flower.
Carnation was exotic and sexy.
Of course I bought a bottle of C-M Carnation that day, and I splashed it on all that summer. It had a high alcohol content, so when I put it behind my ears, it sometimes stung. But that was part of its charm. The stinging somehow matched the peppery sweetness, and they both somehow matched me.
I wasn’t the only one taken by the smell. When I was walking in a park one day, a man sent his son running after to me to find out what perfume I was wearing. An instructor asked me on the last day of class what my fragrance was so he could buy a bottle for his girlfriend. But women liked it, too. By the copy machine one afternoon, a co-worker stopped beside me, closed her eyes, and inhaled.
“You smell so good,” she told me as she came back from her dreamy moment.
You’d think with all those reactions, I would have kept wearing the stuff, but I didn’t. When I moved to a new state, I wanted something different to go with my new life. You know – new city, new phase, new fragrance. I met and fell in love with Coco Chanel. And left Carnation behind.
But just as I kept a flame burning for one or two old boyfriends (or romantic versions of them), I never forgot that carnation cologne. Anyone who has ever tried to find an old love can guess what happened next: when I went to buy the fragrance again a few years later, I found time and the world hadn’t stood still. Caswell-Massey had stopped making Carnation. It was gone.
I searched for alternatives, but in those pre-Internet days, I didn’t know where to look beyond local Minneapolis stores. I ended up contenting myself with Roger & Gallet’s Carnation soap, which had just the right kind of luxurious, pungent spice. But it was soap. I couldn’t dab it behind my ears or splash it on my breastbone.
This spring I found myself again thinking of that heart-shaped bottle with pink flowers, and I decided it was time to try and find a new carnation fragrance to wear. I know memory can be like quicksilver, reflecting what it chooses, so I told myself I didn’t need a replica of C-M Carnation – just something equally spicy and intoxicating.
While I found clove to be a common note in many of the fragrances I sampled, I also found notable differences.
Comme des Garcons / Series 2: Red Carnation EDT: Sheer, like the lightest lover’s touch. A moment in, pepper separates slightly from clove to reveal jasmine, and all this adds to seven-silk-veils quality of this scent. The more I wore it, the more the jasmine in the spice pleased me. Sweet without being powdery or cloying.
Caron / Bellodgia EDP: Many people swear Bellodgia is a premier carnation scent, but for me the description doesn’t fit. Once the top lemony note fades, geranium and floral take over, but the floral isn’t carnation. If perfumes were colors, this wouldn’t be red, pink, or white – it would be chartreuse or forsythia yellow.
Molinard / Oeillet EDC: This mature eau de cologne has a strong carnation note. In the dry down, spicy clove remains, along with powder and a hint of root beer. (What can I say? I like drive-ins, and root beer does have a smell.)
Villoresi / Garofano EDT: Garofano is the Italian word for carnation, and this green smell morphs into a spicy floral after just a few moments – but again, the floral isn’t carnation. I had to sniff and sniff until I figured out this is an old-fashioned and intense rose scent. I liked it and it wore well all day, but it’s rose, rose, rose. Oh, and did I say it smelled like rose?
Santa Maria Novella / Garofano EDC: Straightforward carnation. Sweet without being powdery, orangey without being sour, and clove-spicy. At times I think it comes close to the old Caswell-Massey Carnation, but if I compare it to CDG, it has a much stronger tangerine note. None of the powder that makes some carnations seem babyish.
Fragonard / Billet Doux EDP: Fragonard sent this love letter to oeillet de poete, or sweet William, a member of the carnation family. But for me there is no carnation here, only a complex, floral soapiness. It didn’t surprise me to read this fragrance is a recreation of a 1950’s classic Fragonard scent – it feels dated in a way that Diorissimo (1956) or Joy (1930) don’t.
Caron / Coup de Fouet EDT: This whip-cracking fragrance is said to be the lighter version of Caron’s Poivre, which I’ve never smelled. Taken on its own, it’s a sweet pepper and clove scent with a hint of carnation that develops over time. Is this a grown-up carnation? Edgy oeillet? I don’t know, but I liked finding my flower in such a provocative get-up.
There are more carnations out there to try – Coty’s Oeillet is on my list, as well as Prada’s. But I did buy a bottle of one of the fragrances listed above, and now it’s time to kiss and tell. For me, the jasmine and pepper of the CDG Carnation was irresistible. When my pocketbook allows, I’d like to get the Santa Maria Novella Garofano, too.
* * *
When I was fifteen, I had a twenty-two-year-old boyfriend. He had dark waving hair, almond eyes, and a jaw you could cut paper on. He was also so vacuous my family called him “the village idiot,” but that’s another story.
My boyfriend drove a low-slung orange 240Z in 1978, but the car wasn’t the only place where the letter Z played a role in his life – he also wore Halston Z-14 cologne. Granted, I was only fifteen, but I couldn’t believe a man could smell so good. Z-14 had tang as well as musky darkness, and it seemed to match my boyfriend’s dark, good looks.
But my fascination with the fragrance went beyond wanting to smell it on him. I liked the scent so much I bought a bottle and started wearing it myself. I couldn’t get enough of Z, and I doubt I was the only woman who felt that way about the Halston’s 1976 men’s cologne.
Not only was Bowie’s androgynous appeal still in the air (remember the album cover of “Young Americans” that showed him as a redhead with longs bangs and gold bangles?), but 1978 was also the year that Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” came out. Sylvester’s gayness was unmistakable and irresistible, and it seemed to say that anyone could be anything, as long as it was exuberant.
Even now I miss the free-floating 1970’s, and I marvel at who I was then: a teenage girl, living in a backwoods town in the Appalachians, who wanted to wear not Charlie or Sweet Honesty, but mossy, bergamot-and-leather Halston Z-14.
But of course there’s nothing really unique about that. Unisex perfumes have been around for a long time, and one of them, Jicky, has been in production since it was created in 1889. To be accurate, Aimé Guerlain didn’t set out to create a unisex fragrance: the perfume was supposed to be for women, but they didn’t take to it at first – or so the story goes. Men did like Jicky, though, and so they wore it. That continued until 1912, according to the book Perfume by Richard Stamelman, which was the year women’s fashion reviewers gave women the green light to wear red light Jicky.
I guess I made Z-14 my own private Jicky.
Z-14 is equally heady and dark, with profound corners and real staying power. (Too much staying power say critics of the scent. And I understand – there’s nothing subtle about Z-14.) While Jicky has strong middle cinnamon and vanilla notes, Z-14 reads bergamot for longer, drying down to cedar and leather and never really fading.
Elizabeth Arden acquired Halston fragrances around 1999, and in 2005 the company decided to relaunch Z-14 with the help of NASCAR racing star Jeff Gordon. Arden executives said Gordon was the “embodiment” of Z-14: “masculine, trend-setting, daring, and bold.”
However, Arden’s “Season of Speed” Sweepstakes, a contest which helped advertise the relaunch of the fragrance, was won by a woman named Judith Falk. Maybe she was a NASCAR fan who entered the contest just for a chance to meet Jeff Gordon, but I believe know better.
She fell in love with the Z.
Here are some fragrances you may want to try whether you’re a man or woman. While I’ve put them into the categories in which they're advertised (when available), I believe they can be for anyone. It’s 2008 and we can smell any way we like.
Alexander McQueen’s Kingdom (women) opens with ginger, gradually revealing cumin and sandalwood. Warmth without heaviness in this eau de parfum. The cumin keeps me coming back.
Montale’s Musk to Musk (unisex) is a white musk eau de parfum that opens with a lemony note. Silvery and warm at the same time.
Comme de Garcons Sherbet Rhubarb (unisex) is a clean, green eau de toilette. As fresh as new lettuce leaves at the start, and see-through so a bit of wood and vanilla come out. It doesn’t last long, but while it’s there it delights.
The man in my life offered his wrists and forearms a few times as I was writing this, and his favorite was Montale’s Musk to Musk. And I agree: it smelled wonderful on him. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to share. Unisex does not mean uni-bottle.
