The Scent of Parmenides: Perfume and the Pre-Socratics 3

The rain has returned, raking down with it the thick humidity hanging in the air. After days of waiting patiently for release from captivity, all of the tiny drops suddenly coalesced into sheets, producing a veritable deluge of water rushing down to the ground and bouncing off the streets. The initial water-to-hot-pavement contact produced steam, but after a few moments, the temperature plummeted again by more than twenty degrees. Suddenly I began to see the unity in and of all things.

Over the course of this short period of time, I began to drift back a bit closer toward the thought of Thales once again. Water represents relief, but so does fragrance on unbearably hot days when I look forward to nothing more than returning to my humble abode to rip off all of my clothes, toss them to the floor and spritz myself with a cool and refreshing citrus cologne before grabbing an iced tea or lemonade.

Refreshed at last, I begin to ponder whether Thales may have been right after all. Perhaps the contraries posited by Anaximander and the theory of condensation and rarefaction proposed by Anaximenes do not really explain the true nature of reality.

How to resolve all of these conflicting theories? I seem to be pulled in opposite directions depending upon apparently irrelevant factors such as my current state of mind directly affected by the ambient weather conditions. How to decide whether the views of Thales or Heraclitus or Anaximander and Anaximenes are right? If Thales is right, does this not imply that Heraclitus is wrong? Or are they really in conflict? Perhaps these seeming conflicts can be resolved?

The Problem of the One and the Many

One pre-Socratic philosopher above all, Parmenides, was concerned to find a satisfactory solution to what has come to be known as “the problem of the one and the many.” Parmenides may have been the ultimate “completist,” to invoke a euphemism for what most people regard as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which is one of the reasons why I firmly believe that, in addition to having been a philosopher, he was a perfumista, too.

The problem of the one and the many has many analogues in the world of perfume. Flanker madness is nothing if not a graphic illustration of the problem. There is a perfume, and suddenly there are many others, bearing some version of the same name, housed in a similar if not the same vessel, and marketed as though they were all natural extensions of their namesake. Are Angel and the Jardin d'Etoiles series—Le Lys, La Violette, La Rose, and La Pivoine—really distinct perfumes?

Or are these flankers not bound essentially to the first in the series, Angel, through the use of many of the same ingredients which were present in the original perfume?

The thought of Parmenides may on its surface sound like the ravings of a man who partook of way too much peyote. Nonetheless, I would like to sketch out how it can be understood in a sober, logical, well-scented state of mind. Parmenides appears to have believed, In a phrase, that

What is, is, and what is not, is not.

To some, perhaps many people, this sounds like an empty tautology. It has no content and does not appear to have any implications for the world in which we live. How could a person who espouses this as his philosophy be considered a great thinker? you may with good reason ask.

The key to understanding the wisdom of Parmenides is found in the world of perfume, my fragrant friends, although it is true that historians up until now have not recognized this fact. Let us consider, therefore, what Parmenides would have said about some of today's perfumes. Consider, again, the case of Thierry Mugler Angel.

Before Angel was created in 1992 by Olivier Cresp and Yves de Chirin, Angel did not exist. There was no Angel, and then suddenly there was Angel. Where there was nothing, suddenly there was an iconic perfume, reviled by some, but loved by enough others to spawn a veritable flood of post-Angel perfumes all of which remind us of the one, the only, the original Angel. Sweet patchouli fragrances now abound where before there were none.

In fact, the launch of every such iconic and tattoo perfume in the history of perfumery has involved the generation of something out of nothing, because it is through the act of naming that new objects are created. What is Angel, in reality? Broken down into its constituent parts, Angel is a perfume made up of a variety of substances each of which has been delineated, too, as a separate substance through the act of naming by human beings.

We can and often do decide to gather together a variety of completely disparate things and confer upon them a single name, and then that group is said to exist as a thing in reality. But is it really real? Angel flankers are obviously modeled after their namesake, but many other houses have produced Angel-esque perfumes as well. Tons of perfumes have been said to smell like Angel or to have been inspired by Angel, most of which are really quite different, but here are a couple which do remind me of Angel more than they remind me of, say, Chanel no 5:

“Angel  clones” is a category according to some people, and there certainly have been literal knock-offs, which are sold in drugstores and explicitly claim on their packaging that “If you like Angel, then you'll like X.” But most so-called Angel clones are really just sweet patchouli perfumes with some caramel and maybe some chocolate and usually devoid of the difficult to stomach, garbage pizza-like aspects of the original perfume.

For the most part, accusations of perfume plagiarism—of perfumers allegedly attempting consciously to imitate a wildly successful perfume—seem to me to be a lot of hot air. It seems far more likely to me that combinations of notes begin to gain an appeal to both wearers and perfumers situated in a particular historical and cultural context. Sweet patchouli was a good idea, and many people, perfumers and perfume wearers alike, have agreed on this question since 1992.

Perfumers are not, it seems to me, generally speaking, in the business of copying other perfumers' perfumes. They are interested in creating perfumes. Industrial chemists, on the other hand, may well sit around their gas chromatographs attempting to deduce the ingredients in a sample so that they can produce a literal knock-off. Are some modern perfumers really industrial chemists in disguise? Perhaps.

So what does any of this have to do with Parmenides' tautology, What is, is? According to Parmenides, logic tightly constrains reality so that something cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same way. How can Angel-esque perfumes be like Angel but also be not like Angel? The answer to this puzzle, according to perfumista Parmenides, is that all of the differences of which we assert the existence upon naming this or that thing are illusory. Reality, for Parmenides, is monolithic and unchanging. In effect, Parmenides held the opposite view from that of Heraclitus, who maintained that everything is in flux.

In order to assert the reality of all of the many things which we apparently create by conferring names upon them, we would have to possess formidable powers, indeed, Godlike powers, because we would need to be able to create something out of nothing. But how could this be? How could a non-thing become a thing simply through our attachment of a name to it? This was Parmenides' concern.

Perhaps another illustration from perfumery is needed. We currently have a favorite group of categories of perfume: floral chypre, floriental, fruity floral, aromatic fougère, citrus cologne, oriental vanilla, and so on. Do any of these categories of perfume exist in reality? Or are not these simply useful ways for us to make sense of our experience? Consider the recently invented categories of sweet laundry scents, shampoo and conditioner frags, or one of my own device: the SSRI perfume. What is an SSRI perfume? you may most reasonably inquire.

To me, these are perfumes which have an immediate albeit superficial mood-lifting effect, are affable and friendly and therefore suitable for public spaces such as libraries, and they also have a bright and shiny quality to them. Here are a few SSRI perfumes, in my view:

I believe that Clinique Happy was intended by its creators to be just such an SSRI perfume, but unfortunately it conflicts with many a wearer's physiology to such an extent that some have observed, including one of my sisters, that it should really be called “Unhappy” or even “Miserable”. Interestingly enough, the effect that donning Happy has upon some people may be not unlike the abrupt withdrawal from SSRIs by people who have become habituated to those drugs. Hide the guns. Please. 

So what is the point here? I myself, sherapop, have christened a group of perfumes by the name SSRI. I just made this name up. Thanks to the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, millions of people are on SSRI drugs these days (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), so I decided that this label could be applied equally well to a category of perfumes with similar “don't worry, be happy”-making effects to those of Prozac and the other SSRI drugs in which many modern people's brains are now awash.

How can I, a single person in the vast cosmos, create new things in reality simply by attaching a label to them? Parmenides' answer is: I cannot. I may speak of all of these apparently different categories of perfume delineated by terms either borrowed from others just like me or made up by me, but we are all talking only about the realm of becoming, not the realm of being, which is immutable, eternal, and the essence of reality.

Now, you may say, You, sherapop, cannot invent things by naming them in some arbitrary way, but some things really do exist, for example, chypre perfumes. 

Not so fast, my insufficiently caffeinated imaginary friend and interlocutor. Are you aware of the provenance of the term chypre? Yes, it derives from a perfume of that name launched by the house of Coty nearly a century ago, back in 1917. A single person named that perfume. A person just like you or me, and later that name was appropriated by some other single person to designate what was taken to be a category of perfumes.

One person named each of these things, the original perfume and the category, but the name caught on, and the rest is history. Now we do truly believe in the existence of chypre perfumes. In the beginning, however, they were really no different from my SSRI perfumes, created by the slapping of a label on a group of diverse things by a single person. In the case of the perfume, a group of diverse ingredients were put together in a single bottle and this was labeled Chypre. In the case of the category, a group of diverse perfumes were set out together on a table (metaphorically), and this group was labeled chypre.

What is really real? All is one. There is only one real thing, and that thing is being, according to the very first ontologist in the written history of Western philosophy, Parmenides. We flail about desperately in the realm of becoming, distracting ourselves from the truth, which is unitary and does not admit of division or change. It is also ineffable, so we cannot literally talk about anything, including Parmenides' theory of reality, as paradoxical as that may seem.

I realize that such a theory may sound a bit crazy, but I think that if one reflects upon the creation act involved in the launch of new perfumes, one can at least gesture toward and perhaps even approach the truth of what Parmenides was trying to convey. Why should a mixture of a bunch of different chemicals, upon which a label, Angel, is slapped, suddenly be said to exist as a separate thing in reality? That is the question, my fragrant friends.

Now the plausibility of Parmenides' thought is going to turn entirely and only on your personal commitment to the law of non-contradiction: ~ (p & ~-p). In natural language:

It is not the case that something can both be and not be p 
at the same time and in the same way (where p = any property).

The reason why we know about Parmenides more than two thousand years after he passed away is because he managed to persuade a few people of the wisdom of his views, including not only Plato, whose theory of the Forms (which will be treated in a future episode of The History of Philosophy Refracted Through Perfume), but also his pupil Zeno.

Zeno's Paradox 
or

The Decanter's Infinitely Divisible Bottle of Vintage Perfume

Zeno, an avid acolyte of Parmenides, is best known for what has come to be referred to as Zeno's paradox, which has a few different popular expressions, but the perfume version of which has unfortunately been suppressed. So let us fill in the gaps in the historical record by here sketching out how Zeno's paradox might play out in the case of perfume.

Consider a full bottle of perfume. A nice, big 100ml bottle, sealed, pristine, and ready to spritz for the very first time. Let us pretend for a moment that we are decanters, as lamentable as that would be.  We wish to pipette our beautiful bottle of vintage Mitsouko perfume into aliquots to sell to our anxious customers ready and willing to pay the price of a bottle for the privilege of sniffing even a tiny sample of this iconic perfume, in all likelihood obtained through ebay from a hawk who may or may not have any scruples about selling fakes and diluted perfumes. But so long as perfumistas refrain from thinking about all of this, we, the decanters who make the final sale, will be in fine financial form. We know that in the aftermath of the tragic reformulation of this once great perfume, people will be clamoring to get their nose on what we've got hidden in our vault.

What to do? We wish to divide our volume of perfume into the smallest possible aliquots, so as to maximize our profit from this bottle. We paid $50, but as Zeno's paradox will demonstrate, we can squeeze an infinite amount of money from this bottle as follows.

Imagine an initial aliquot of, say, 5 mls. We could divvy up our bottle into twenty such aliquots and charge $20 for each, giving us a grand total of $400 or a profit of $350, that is, 700%. But why stop there? Why not divide each of those 5 ml aliquots into two, making forty decants of 2.5 mls and thereby doubling our profit? But wait, there's more!

Now we could divide the decants once again, to produce 1.25 ml decants, doubling our profit yet again. If we follow this process to its logical limit we will find that we will never exhaust the number of decants—and hence amount of money—which we can squeeze from this single bottle. Ingenious, indeed!

What does this example show? That the decanter's bottle can never be emptied, because in order to remove a decant we must first remove two decants of half of the size of the original decant. But the same is true of the second, smaller decant, and the same is true of the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. I think that you can see clearly now where all of this is leading.

Change is illusory. Why? Because this bottle of perfume will always remain full, no matter what we do. If it appears to be drained empty, that is only because we are deluded by imperfect nonbeing, the realm of mere appearances.

So there you have it, my fragrant friends, a perfumic proof of Parmenides' view:

All is one.

Having vainly attempted to access True Being, I think that it's about time that we all returned to the realm of becoming.

The Question of Vintage 2: The Moral of the Mystery Scent Vial Trial and Related Ruminations

Are people who engage in discussions about vintage perfumes
ever really talking about the same thing?

I continue to ask this question most sincerely but have yet to receive a satisfactory—or any—answer from vintage-lovers themselves. We are obliged, therefore, my fellow fragrant travelers, to forge on without them. The time has arrived at last to regale you with the tale and share the results of a recent experience of mine which bears directly on the never more weighty topic at hand.

Having recently completed a Mystery Scent Vial Trial (marvelously mentored by salonista Awesomeness), The Question of Vintage has been pressing more and more insistently upon my mind. Indeed, the question achieved an acute sense of urgency as a small group of my perfumista friends attempted to determine the identity of the perfumes contained within four vials prepared by Awesomeness and marked only with the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The Mystery Scent Vial Trial involved a mixture of vintage and reformulated classic perfumes. Some of the vials contained perfumes, I would later learn, which I had never smelled. Others I had tested in name, but in composition? That is another matter altogether!

If the Estée Lauder Youth Dew familiar to me was not from the same formulation as the one in the vial, much less the same batch, can I really make any claims or assumptions whatsoever about Youth Dew in general? Can anyone, pray tell? If I have only ever sniffed the reformulation of a classic perfume such as Coty Emeraude, should I be able to recognize a vintage sample when I come across it?

Through the now historic Mystery Scent Vial Trial 1 (we'll be doing more of them, I am delighted to be able to report), I discovered that the answer to the questions in both cases was a resounding No.

Reformulated Youth Dew smelled different enough from my experience of vintage Youth Dew to sow doubts in my mind, causing me first to guess that the vial contained that perfume, then to retract my guess, and finally to settle once again on Youth Dew as the best candidate, though the composition had obviously changed. If the truth be known, I eventually gravitated back to the correct answer, not only because I could not come up with anything else that rivaled the contents of the vial in sheer stinkiness, but also because no other perfume in my experience had ever looked the same!

Yes, Youth Dew, the ironically named Platonic Form of Old Lady Perfume, is the only elixir in existence empirically indistinguishable from the dehydrated body fluids of a nonagenarian who chain-smoked Camel straights for seventy years. The perfume has been reformulated, but for ready identification—or perhaps in a half-hearted gesture of hypocritical veneration—the appearance has been kept more or less the same.

The most surprising and problematic of the Mystery Scent Vial Trial cases involved vintage Halston eau de cologne, of which I happen to have a bottle in the back of my armoire, although I never use it and do not recall any occasion on which I ever did. I do not know why, to be honest, but that's the way it is. Come to think of it, it may have had something to do with the fact that someone I knew wore it, someone whom I, let us say, did not want to emulate... In any case, what I discovered when I compared my vintage Halston edc in a side-by-side test with the vintage Halston edc in the vial was that, lo and behold, they smelled nothing alike!

All of this was of course grist for my skeptical mill and specifically supported my contention that even two initially identical perfumes, drawn from the very same batch, can transform radically over the course of the years since they parted ways—separated at birth, so to speak—in the manner of identical twins given up to two different adoptive families.

But the results of Mystery Scent Vial Trial 1 also offer, more generally, further grounds for my relative cynicism about the entire enterprise—and it is one, you may rest assured, thanks to decanters—of vintage perfume. Which reminds me: I recently learned from a quick cyberstroll through a few decanter aisles that my vintage bottle of Balmain Ivoire is worth … drum roll ... $4,000!

That's right, believe it or not, The Perfumed Court charges $199 for a 5ml decant of a perfume, a 100ml bottle of which I picked up from a discount emporium for $20. How could this possibly be? you may well be wondering, and not without reason.

The answer is disarmingly simple: discount emporia are not in the vintage business. They are in the “get rid of large palettes of old boxes of old perfumes as quickly as possible” business. They know that young perfume users (the most frequent consumers of their wares) are usually looking to acquire new launches and celebrity perfumes.

This is how and why we perfumistas can sometimes enrich our collections with a bottle of Balmain perfume for $20. Are the bottles vintage? Sometimes they are; sometimes they are not. It's all a game of chance. This same bottle lottery of sorts makes it possible for decanters, too, to transform “leftovers” and “undesirables” acquired from discount emporia into veritable gold-mine finds, as the case of my $4,000 bottle of Balmain Ivoire amply illustrates.

So what's wrong with that? you may ask, and not without reason. What, indeed, is wrong with marking a bottle up from $20 to $4,000? That's only 10,000%, after all.

The questions are no doubt proliferating and surfacing rapidly in your mind, not unlike the bubbles of a freshly opened bottle of Gerolsteiner mineral water:

Is sherapop some kind of communist??

Is she asserting the existence of a military-industrial-congressional-media-pharmaceutical-perfume decanter complex???

Don't decanters deserve to make a living just like everybody else????

Calm down, calm down, my fragrant friends. Yes, of course, they may do whatever they like, and if people are foolish enough to pay the prices they ask for their decanted perfumes, then they deserve what they get—whatever it may be! Which reminds me of a tangentially related topic...

***

I must confess to a complete lack of understanding of the recent case in which a French court fined a group of big perfume houses 40 million euros ( = 53 million U.S. dollars) for price-fixing policies which resulted in ... charging their customers too much? What?? Isn't that just capitalism???

Well, it's clearly the case that here, in the good old plutocratic United States of America, whoever has the gold makes the rules. Isn't that, after all, why CEOs in this country earn more in a year than a dozen functionaries and grunts do together in a lifetime?

I might understand such a case if it involved fining companies for, say, withholding milk from small children and thus jeopardizing their lives. (Of course that would never happen—I mean the fines...) But … perfume? What is this world coming to?

Well, assuming that the judgment sticks (which would surprise me, frankly), one thing is clear: the French government needs to enlist some of their francophone friends in Montreal to send some mounties on mooses down to investigate the practices of the persons working behind the scenes at The Perfumed Court posthaste!

Of course, there are much swifter and surer solutions to these nagging concerns, and you may rest assured that the power brokers at Estée Lauder (one of the implicated companies, most of the rest of which were French, dont LVMH) have been strategizing assiduously, day and night since the judgment, not only to evade the abominable fine but to reveal the intrinsic corruption of the French justice system which led to this outrageous and flagrant mistake.

For those of you who do not already know, here are the current members of the Estée Lauder Empire, er, Group:

• Estée Lauder
• Aramis
• Clinique
• Prescriptives
• Lab Series Skincare For Men
• Origins
• Tommy Hilfiger
• M•A•C
• Kiton
• La Mer
• Bobbi Brown
• Donna Karan
• Aveda
• Jo Malone
• Bumble and bumble
• Michael Kors
• Darphin
• American Beauty
• Flirt!
• GoodSkin Labs
• Grassroots Research Labs
• Sean John
• Missoni
• Tom Ford
• Coach
• Ojon
• Smashbox
• Ermenegildo Zegna

This ever-lengthening list leads one quite naturally to inquire: What will the future bring?

Would it really be such a stretch to add General Electric to the Estée Lauder Group portfolio? I think not. From there, a resolution to the problem at hand would of course be academic, and I've no need to spell out the details of what this would involve to you, my astute fellow fragrant travelers.

Then again, on the off chance that one of the dull members of the duct tape crowd is lurking about—no doubt looking for a topic of discussion a bit more interesting than “What's your favorite Creed?”—perhaps I should sketch out the broad outlines of how the story would proceed.

With General Electric under the auspices of the Estée Lauder Group, the enthusiastic support of the United Nations—and, more importantly, the power to back it up—would also be in their clasp. Should the confused French government persist, they would never, ever succeed in extracting the money, since they themselves do not possess the military means by which to threaten any consequences for refusal to comply.

To those who believe that France's veto power at the U.N. might be more than nominal, I can only reply: so did Dominique de Villepin back in 2003. Remember the invasion of Iraq? A violation of international law according to then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan himself? Need I say more?

Suffice it say, then, that with the acquisition of General Electric by the Estée Lauder Group, the French court folly (as it will be written into history by the victors) would be definitively resolved. Meanwhile, on another front, the three housewives armed with pipettes and vast stockpiles of vintage perfume—in addition to all of their analogues strewn across the broad underbelly of this land—would be summarily vaporized by Predator drone. Alas, such a victory for us would be merely Pyrrhic, for animal rights activists, too, would suddenly and not-so-mysteriously evaporate from the face of the earth.

Well, for now, rather than spinning out any further dystopic fantasies, let us just hope that the French government will begin importing large shipments of Peet's coffee very soon. Where were we? Ah yes,...

***

Salonista and fellow fragrance fanatic Fruitdiet reports that a palette currently being emptied at Amazon contains ... drum roll ... vintage Balmain Ivoire! If you drop what you're doing right now—yes, navigate away from this page—and rush to place an order at Amazon immediately, you may or may not be sent a bottle from that very same propitious palette, and your possible treasure may turn out to be just a cheap reformulation dud. On the other hand, if the decanters obtained their (appreciated) $4,000 bottle from e-bay, it may also be a cheap reformulation, unbeknownst to them. Three housewives armed with pipettes. Yes, Charybdis and Scylla rear their ugly heads once again...

Awesomeness pointed out in a comment on The Question of Vintage that if you can date a perfume by its bottle, then that's always a good thing. The woman not only smells sublime; she also speaks the truth, which is of course divine. I believe that dating bottles obtained from purveyors of perfume who are not a part of the decanter-vintage enterprise (not quite as insidious as the merely hypothetical military-industrial-congressional-media-pharmaceutical-perfume decanter complex...) is actually more likely to reveal the age of the perfume inside.

Why? Because discount emporia are not thinking in big price terms. They are thinking in little price terms multiplied by lots of bottles—again, warehouses and palettes. In stark contrast, e-bay peddlers of perfume—and their moral equivalents, gray market decanters—are thinking in vintage terms, wringing their hands together as they calculate the maximum price they will be able to command for a single vintage perfume persuasively promoted and divided into tiny "hand-decanted" (quoi d'autre?) aliquots.

***

Our lengthy excursus embedded within an excursus of what may have seemed to be dubious relevance does in fact eventually lead us back to the crux of a far more substantive concern: the breakdown in communication between perfumistas occasioned by the simultaneous existence of two completely different perfumes bearing precisely the same name and produced by the very same house.

Call it the problem of Estée Lauder Youth Dew, or the problem of Balmain Ivoire, or the problem of Guerlain Mitsouko, as you like: it's all the same problem, and it is now in virtual ubiquity as a direct result of IFRA restrictions-rationalized reformulations running rife.

Yes, far more serious than the first Tower of Babel problem of variable hyposmias, anosmias, and hyperosmias, which is exacerbated, of course, by skin chemistry, vintage perfumes and their reformulations constitute one of the greatest sources of breakdowns of communication, another notable case of, yes, none other than the Tower of Babel in perfumery.

I implore someone, anyone, anywhere, to please answer these questions at last:

Are people who engage in discussions about vintage and reformulated perfumes which go by the same name even talking about the same thing?

What does it mean, today, to say that your favorite perfume is Guerlain Mitsouko?

part 1

The Question of Vintage

A Valentine's Day Massacre

In a delightful scene of Martin Scorsese's 1990 film Goodfellas, Henry Hill's concubine Janice is showing off her “kept-woman” apartment to a couple of her girlfriends and leads them into the bedroom, where she unselfconsciously remarks, "This is where we spend most of our time." One of her friends walks over to Janice's chest of drawers, picks up a bottle of perfume, removes the top and sniffs as she approvingly observes, "French," a knowing look in her eye.

It will be considered sacrilege by some, but I feel compelled here to confess that whenever I hear the word vintage roll off a perfumista's tongue, I think of Janice's friend. The word vintage has acquired such a magical allure that the mere mention of it seems to fill listeners with awe and admiration for whatever object it is being used to describe. I am fascinated by this fascination with all things vintage, and above all perfume, probably because I simply do not understand it.

In fact, I have been puzzling for quite some time over the profound reverence which many perfumistas exhibit toward what have been identified as vintage perfumes. Fragrance community websites all have their forums where “vintage lovers” convene to discuss their latest acquisitions and to strategize about how to get their nose on others. I have never participated in these discussions, first, because I have no idea what they are presumably talking about and, second, because I have serious reservations about the entire enterprise of “vintage perfume” to begin with. And I do mean enterprise.

What's in a name?

First, and most fundamentally, I do not understand what the term vintage is supposed to mean. My distinct impression—and please correct me, if I'm wrong—is that the word has been appropriated from the world of wine. Whatever the precise origins of the term and the story that led to its current use, vintage is being applied now, with ever greater fervor, to perfume.

Apparently, despite the fact that I myself never made any effort whatsoever to acquire any vintage perfume, I own quite a large volume of the stuff, including my bottles of Christian Dior Dolce Vita and J'Adore; Guerlain Samsara, Mahora, Jardins de Bagatelle, Champs Elysées, Chant d'Arômes, Terracotta Voile d'Eté, and Shalimar (among others); Jean Patou Sublime, Joy, 1000, and Sira des Indes; and Yves Saint Laurent Champagne (now known as Yvresse).



Guerlain Samsara (1989) = Vintage



Rochas Femme (1989) = Not Vintage

On the other hand, my bottles of Rochas all seem to be reformulations, so they are apparently not vintage, despite the fact that reformulated Femme dates to the same year as unreformulated—hence vintage—Samsara! So it appears that all of the bottles of “vintage” perfume in my collection became vintage simply through having been acquired before the perfume in question was reformulated! One rather odd implication of this common understanding of the term vintage would seem to be that every single brand new bottle I own is also vintage, having yet to be reformulated.

In the case of discontinued perfumes, everything in the category is, by definition, “vintage”. In the decades to come, long after Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson have departed from this world, will people be clamoring for bottles of Believe, Midnight Fantasy, Fancy and Fancy Love for the simple reason that they are old? What about Aquolina Pink Sugar or Vera Wang Rock Princess or ____________ (fill in the blank with any currently popular perfume which you personally regard as unwearable junk)? My point here is a simple one: even more problematic about the whole vintage enterprise is the undeniable fact that sophisticated perfumistas do not agree contemporaneously about which are the greatest perfumes. Why in the world should they agree about the past?

That question leads directly to my second major concern. As I think through the implications of any specific definition which might be said to capture “vintage perfume”, I become confused as to why anyone should care more about those creations than about any others. It is obvious, of course, why gray-market decanters aggressively promote the notion that “vintage” is better than non-vintage perfume. As one peruses the offerings at The Perfumed Court—run by three nice housewives armed with pipettes, or so the urban legend goes—one begins to notice that certain especially high-priced items appear to be so because they carry the resplendent epithet vintage.

Such items seem most likely to have been acquired from e-bay by the decanters and then sold as veritable treasures, genuine antiques of sorts. Now, why such perfumes should be considered any more likely to be what they are claimed to be than when they are bought directly from e-bay is a question which those who frequent decanters appear rarely, if ever, to entertain. But, my fragrant friends: You cannot have it both ways. If the ladies who make up The Perfumed Court are simply housewives trying to make a bit of money the good old-fashioned American way, then there is no real reason for believing that they are any better at assessing the authenticity of vintage perfumes than is anyone else. I rest my case.

So the set of first-order concerns I have about the enterprise of vintage perfume is identical with each and every one of the problems which may arise in acquiring used perfume from e-bay. Those problems transfer immediately to vintage perfumes acquired from decanters because, in most cases, the bottles would seem to have been obtained from e-bay or through e-bay-like channels. Perfumes are acquired and then marked up and re-sold by decanters, whose christening of the bottles as “vintage” seems to be taken as some sort of certificate of both authenticity and quality. Soyons sérieux. Let's think through the history of a vintage bottle of perfume.

The Toll of Time on All Things

Suppose that a bottle of vintage perfume was produced in 1961, just to pick a year out of a hat. That's fifty years ago. Many perfumistas were not even born at that time, but I think that the changes which have transpired over the course of the life of a person who was born in 1961 illustrate very well how much can happen to a thing—any thing, including a bottle of perfume—during a period of five short decades. A tiny little human being is born bright and shiny new with fresh tender skin (if caucasian, the baby's skin may be as white as snow). She has no apparent linguistic capacity initially and weighs very little.

As the infant grows, her cells change as a result of both biology and environment, or nature and nurture. Slowly her skin becomes thicker, she learns to speak, and eventually to lie, and the state of her soul as of her body may have as much to do with factors external as internal to her. Girls born into posh wealthy households do not generally, for example, grow up to become prostitutes. This does not mean that wealthy people are more virtuous than poor people. No, it means only that they tend to be considerably less desperate.

In the case of a perfume born in 1961, there is no inherent biological mechanism in place which leads the perfume to evolve and change, but what is indisputably the case is that the molecules initially present do begin to show their age, so to speak, as the years flitter by, exactly as a human being's body and face begin to show traces of age. The rate and extent of the visible signs of aging have something—and perhaps a great deal—to do with what the person does.

A person who regularly quaffs large volumes of water, takes vitamins, eats leafy green vegetables, wears sunscreen, and generally avoids toxins such as cigarettes, alcohol, BHT and artificial sweeteners (which always seem to be identified as carcinogenic a couple of decades after their approval by the FDA!), may look significantly younger at age 50 than a chain-smoking alcoholic who spends her days lounging about outside under the blazing sun attempting to achieve the darkest possible tan. Perhaps her idea of exercise involves the lifting of a glass of rum and Diet Coke to her lips. Having once been young and beautiful, it may never occur to her alcohol-addled mind to adopt preventive measures such as sunscreen to forestall the ravages of time.

Suppose that two such people were twins. In spite of their identical origins, if two biologically similar people conduct themselves in radically disparate ways, they may end up by looking very different by the age of 50. Similarly, I would like to suggest here, two bottles of the same batch of perfume produced at exactly the same time—indeed, drawn from the very same vat—may travel very different paths to what they eventually become fifty years later down the line. In the best case scenario, a vintage perfume will have been well-cared for, shielded from heat and light, rarely if ever opened, and thus effectively preserved to the maximum capacity in its optimum state.

The perfume may well still have changed, at least to some extent, because molecules fall apart over time just as even the most vigilant, pro-active woman's skin will wrinkle, notwithstanding the thousands of dollars she may spend on creams, lotions, and various and sundry other treatments over the course of her life. Eventually, even a woman who has availed herself of every conceivable technique by which to forestall the effects of time will look old. Maybe not at age 40 (cf. Jennifer Aniston), or even at age 50 (cf. Demi Moore), but if she is lucky enough to live to be 80, she will look old: it's a fact. Some people may look “young for 80,” but of course that usually means something like “closer to 60.” By the time people reach the age of 90 or 100, they have wrinkles on top of wrinkles, no matter what they do—not that they care by that point.

The perfume which is well-cared for over the course of decades, too, will show its age eventually, because the chemicals which make it up have degeneration trajectories as well. There is a reason, after all, why newly launched perfumes carry a “use by” advisory label and icon. Some labels on the bottoms or boxes of perfumes recommend use within 36 months from the time it has been opened, and thus exposed to air, which initiates the breakdown process of the chemicals contained therein.

With bottles not under vacuum pressure—such as hand-poured decants in spray atomizers—the perfume is exposed to air and begins to evaporate almost immediately. This explains why perfumes in screw-top bottles or with removable bulb atomizers often decrease in volume whether or not one has been wearing them very much. I have also noticed that purple- and blue-colored perfumes sometimes turn brown after only a couple of years. They may still smell okay, but this is a clear sign that change has already taken place, and is currently underway.

My question for all of you vintage-enamored perfumistas is simply this: When you purchase a vintage perfume, are you getting the bottle analogous to the woman who takes meticulous care of herself and adopts pro-active measures to protect her skin and health? Or are you getting the bottle analogous to the woman whose motto is best summed up Carpe Diem or, perhaps, Whatever?

Who is in a Position to Certify Authenticity and Quality?

Obviously, everyone who is selling vintage perfume claims that they are offering you the first, not the second kind of bottle. But how can you know this? Even if you believe that the person with whom you are dealing is honest and forthright, what if that person was not around during the previous four decades of the perfume's life? It seems quite clear that perfume which is currently being well-cared for cannot regain what it has already lost any more than a woman who laid out in the sun, chain-smoked and drank heavily for thirty years can reverse the damage done.

In fact, on reflection, it seems to me that the odds of getting the first rather than the second sort of bottle are much worse than even. Why? Because every single person who is selling a vintage perfume either does not care about perfume (and perhaps happened upon it through an inheritance or by gift) or else he or she needs money. Why else would they even bother selling it? Whichever of these two happens to be the case, the odds seem to me quite slim that the bottle which is being vaunted as a precious vintage perfume to you, a potential buyer, is going to be in very good shape.

These are of course mundane practical concerns regarding whether or not you should trust people who are trying to fob their old, unwanted perfume off on you in order to earn a quick buck. The more they can build a case for the pristine perfection of the vintage perfume which they are trying to sell, the higher the price they will be able to command. Who among e-bay sellers will confess that, in fact, they themselves did not even exist at the launch of the purportedly “perfect” vintage perfume now in their possession? And, if it's so perfect and precious, then why are they trying to get rid of it? I ask most sincerely.

 These questions lead directly, in my mind, to another major source of skepticism about vintage perfume purchases. They are being sold by people who need money. This makes what they say seem about as dependable as the words of bounty hunters being bribed with bags of cash to give up the names of terrorists. The most obvious problem with that procedure is that the circumstances in which such bounty hunters thrive are precisely those in which their regular avenues of employment have been obstructed—usually by regime change brought about by war. Under the circumstances, a bounty hunter may very well feel fully justified in lying in order to acquire the means of sustenance required for himself and the innocent members of his family thrown into crisis by the advent of war. But I digress...

Now, setting all such practical concerns to one side, the question of vintage ramifies in many other far more philosophical directions, as well. One is that “vintage perfume” offers an example of a deeply engrained cultural contradiction. On the one hand, we value and laud everything bright and shiny and new. So each time that a new perfume or series of perfumes is launched, we rush to obtain samples and pen our reviews. But, according to the vintage view of things, old perfumes are better than new perfumes.

Many perfumistas appear to be seduced in opposite directions simultaneously: nostalgically toward the past and progressively toward the future. New niche launches are viewed as a cause for celebration, while vintage perfumes are also sought out. At the same time, many new perfumes (especially mainstream) are mercilessly trashed as knock-offs, while virtually all old perfumes are worshiped as great. In some ways, The Question of Vintage is the flip-side of The Question of Niche, because today's sought-after vintage perfumes were none other than yesterday's mainstream launches. 

A few astute perfumistas such as Action have stood up to the nouvelle vague of niche, but many perfumistas both venerate vintage and demand innovation for the sake of innovation in the very next breath. These contradictions eventually lead back to The Tower of Babel 2 and the question whether in perfumery we seek beauty or novelty, art or function. The underlying assumption among vintage aficionados appears to be that anything vintage is automatically beautiful, though most of it they have not and could never have sniffed.

I ask, therefore, most sincerely: What is the point of lamenting long-lost perfumes (as Turin and Sanchez, co-authors of The Holey[sic] Book are wont to do), and what, precisely, is supposed to be the point of sniffing and writing about perfumes stored under argon gas and inaccessible to 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of humanity?

I entreat you, my dear fragrant friends and fellow travelers, to offer solutions to these conundra and, above all, to illuminate the errors in my thinking about vintage perfume!

part 2