Trickle Down or Wash Out? Niche Perfumery Takes a Hit--From the New York Times!

I subscribe to "Perfume News" from the New York Times, which seldom arrives, and on the rare occasion when it does, usually turns out to be a press release about a new mass market fragrance or line which somehow made it past the gatekeepers who presumably determine what does and does not constitute news. It's not that surprising, really, given that the perfume industry is an intrinsically hype-ridden zone. The "critics" (I mean the ones who earn money for writing about perfume...) are shills; the perfumers are often hacks. Big corporations--above all, LVMH, Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder, and Coty Prestige--continue to gobble up small houses and are, needless to say, profit driven. What's new in any of that?

Yesterday's NYT Perfume News, "Trickle Down Fragrances: Mass-Market Perfumes Developed by High-Price Noses," was remarkable in that it not only shilled for a new perfume line, the Sonia Kashuk Collection for Target, but also directly attacked the niche perfumery enterprise, claiming that comparable perfumes can be had for a fraction of the cost:

Perfume lovers can now buy a deeply scented bottle of a new eau de toilette, blended with natural oils of sandalwood and jasmine absolute sambac, both imported from India, formulated by the French-trained perfumer who has worked on scents from luxurious niche brands like Atelier Cologne, which last year introduced a pair of fragrances in sleek glass bottles infused with either gold or silver, retailing at $195.

That earthy scent, called Red Promisia, costs $19.99 and is sold only at Target.

Am I the only person to question, first, whether this is news and, second, whether any of it is true? Let's consider four more specific questions, since comments were not allowed on this "news feature" at the New York Times:

1. Isn't Indian sandalwood in short supply? Isn't that part of the reason why Guerlain Samsara was reformulated?
2. Isn't jasmine absolute restricted by the IFRA? Isn't that another part of the reason why Guerlain Samsara was reformulated?
3. I am admittedly not the biggest fan of Atelier Cologne, but don't their $195 bottles hold a full 200ml? 
4. Finally, who is Rachel Helder, and for whom does she really work?

Critical Notice: Maison Guerlain, Cinquième Génération

Last week, on December 14, 2013, TV3 aired a fifty-two minute documentary on the house of Guerlain which will surely be of interest to all francophone perfume lovers. The short film, directed by Geneviève Vaudran, traces the early history of the house of Guerlain and offers glimpses into many aspects of the recent changes as well. Among the highlights are:

• Thierry Wasser is featured in many scenes and at one point toes the IFRA line, reporting that rose, ylang-ylang and jasmine may be hazardous to your health--not only allergenic, but ... carcinogenic!

• At a dinner out with Wasser, Alberto Morillas corrects Jacques Cavallier's characterization of the three men as "artists", saying that in fact they are "artisans".

• Several attractive celebrities, including Jade Jagger (Why? you may ask) share their early encounters with perfume.

• According to Guerlain, the first truly modern perfume was not Chanel no 5 (for its aldehydes), but Jicky, for its coumarin! 

• The house of Guerlain version of the story of post-World War II G.I.s on the Champs-Elysées: they were lined up to buy ... L'Heure Bleue! 

• Soap (glorious soap!) was an important part of the early house of Guerlain output.

• A brief treatment of the "racist slur scandal" involving Jean-Paul Guerlain (when he said he worked "comme un nègre" [like a nigger]".

• But the man has a heart: JPG is brought to tears as he reminisces about his father.

• An acknowledgement that some believe that the second rupture (beyond the end of the family line represented by the appointment of Wasser as head perfumer), the acquisition of Guerlain by LVMH, has caused the illustrious house to lose its "soul". Others are said to regard the acquisition as an opportunity for change. (I think that you know my view...)

• In the history of perfumery according to Guerlain, Gabriel was more important than  Gabrielle!

All of this and more awaits anyone fluent in French (there are no subtitles). For others, the images (and sweet sonority of the French language) may be worth your time as well... Here is a link:

Maison Guerlain, cinquième génération

Do Perfume Managers Matter?

One nice thing about having a blog is that you can do whatever you like there. Really. Long essays, short essays. Manifestos, haiku. Serious criticism, frivolous fiction. Film essays, satire, rants, confessions...--it's all open to the writer, and there is no annoying editor hovering above attempting to turn every occurrence of 'which' in your text to 'that' because some tyrannical American copyeditor at some point about fifty years ago decided to rewrite the rules of English grammar for this side of the pond.

A blog is not a job, and it is the most open forum for free expression in the twenty-first century, it seems to me (who else, after all?!). Many bloggers extend apologies for absences, dereliction of duty, and the like. I believe that I may have done that in the past once or twice. But I'm turning over a new leaf today. This is my blog. If personal reasons, or "other priorities", as former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney would say, prevent me from sharing the eruptions of my cortex for an entire month, well, you can be sure that those were pretty good reasons. Why? Because they were sufficient for me.

That said, I'd like to discuss a single sentence today from a lengthy book which I hope to review in the future, but I cannot yet, as I am still reading it. I often find that thick books written in French about perfume (yes, there are a few...) throw out all sorts of incredibly contentious ideas as though they were conventional wisdom. Maybe the French think differently about perfume than anglophones? I'm not so sure, but eventually I'll mow my way through and post complete reviews of all of these very interesting books, which I picked up during a buying spree at Amazon.fr.

For now, let us start with a single sentence packed with meaning and debate potential and open up the salon for a rousing discussion of what precisely it means and implies to other people as well as me. The sentence comes from one of the very few published books on the philosophy of olfaction, or the sense of smell. This book is much more about perfume than anything else, and focuses on aesthetics, the art question and the like, but the title is:

Philosophie de l'odorat (2010)

par Chantal Jaquet

A Philosophy of Olfaction

by Chantal Jaquet

The intriguing text, on page 245 of chapter 4, "L'art olfactif [Olfactory Art]," follows upon the author's discussion of the shocking disparity between the costs of marketing and packaging and management, and the actual amount of money spent in producing the liquid perfume itself. 

We have discussed this topic here at the salon de parfum before, but for anyone who missed the Daily Finance article "Behind the Spritz," the gist of it is that of the price of a $100 mainstream designer fragrance, only $2 goes for the actual juice.The rest... well, read the article, and you'll find out. In the text preceding the quote to which I'll turn shortly, Chantal Jaquet has been quoting Annick Le Guérier, who basically argues that if only 2% of the production cost is the perfume, then it's not possible to use expensive materials. (She may have been drawing on the very same article, since the figures are identical, or perhaps her discussion and the article had the same source.) I do not have a copy of Guérier's book, Le parfum des origines à nos jours [Perfume from its origins to the present day], but hopefully I'll find one at some point. Guérier writes (and is directly cited by Jaquet):

"Pas de rose, pas de jasmin, mais des produits de synthèse pas chers."

[No rose, no jasmine, only cheap synthetics.]

Well, we've all heard and smelled this abstract song and dance before. But Jaquet reasons from Guérier's observations about the proportion of production costs now being invested in the perfume itself (as opposed to everything else) that

"Dans ces conditions, il est clair que la qualité du parfum, 

s'en ressent et qu'il n'est guère question de création artistique."

[Under these conditions, it is obvious that the quality of the perfume will be affected 

and can hardly be a matter of artistic creation.]

First question: Isn't this a non sequitur? Does it follow from the fact that marketing and other costs absorb most of the price of a fragrance that it cannot be an artistic creation? I think not, but following Bryan Ross over at From Pyrgos, it seems clear that the problem for the "perfume is art" thesis is not the percentage of the production cost but the very fact that perfume is created to satisfy the caprices of other people, and therefore is not purely an expression of the perfumer's will. Given the "political economy," so to speak, of perfume production, it is properly regarded as a product of design--just like all other designed objects. It's not that the materials being used today are cheap, but that the entire process is dictated by business managers who make all of the big decisions. With only rare exceptions, perfumers, in effect, serve at the pleasure of their managers.

A propos, at last we arrive at the text which I really wanted to share with you. It's a citation by Jaquet of the words of Patrick Choël, president of perfumes and cosmetics at LVMH:

"Penser à l'élaboration d'un concept, d'une idée forte et simple, trouver ensuite un nom qui le reflète, puis imaginer un flacon et un packaging unique, développer une campagne de communication adéquate et, enfin, créer un jus. Je place volontairement la création de la fragrance en dernier."

[To come up with a concept, a strong and simple idea, to find a name to correspond to the idea, then to envision a bottle and unique packaging, develop a solid marketing campaign, and then to create a juice. I deliberately leave the fragrance for last.]

Whoa. My fragrant friends: I do believe that we have discovered the solution to the mystery of what happened to post-Y2K Guerlain. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Monsieur Choël has written the playbook for many a new niche venture as well. 

Your thoughts? Please, weigh in!

Between Charybdis and Scylla: Is There a Third Way?

The Professor's Signature Scent:
Escentric Molecules Molecule 01

Thurston Howell III's Signature Scent:
Creed Royal English Leather (vintage!)

???

The world of perfumery is swiftly transforming in so many ways that it is becoming progressively more difficult to navigate the territory, as it shifts constantly under one's feet. The once-independent designer houses have now nearly all been swallowed up by corporate giants such as Procter & Gamble, Coty, Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, Puig, L'Oréal, and LVMH. Are the perfumes being produced by designer houses under the aegis of corporate masters more or less the same as they were before? Or have they essentially and irrevocably changed?

Perhaps no grand and sweeping generalizations can be made, but we can consider individual cases and may discover that the perfumes all being signed by one perfumer under LVMH but issuing from ostensibly distinct houses are converging in style. Similarly, we may take note of the convergence of Rochas and Patou under P&G, or that of Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein under Coty Prestige.

Even while being conducted by publicly traded companies, the business of perfumery remains a secretive one, and it may not be possible to ascertain whether corporate suits get the final say on what happens after a perfume has been approved by the house's creative director. We really don't know. All that we can do is attempt to divine what is going on at P&G, Coty Prestige, LVMH, and the other corporations now in on the perfume business game. We can do this by considering the quality and type of perfumes being purveyed by the houses under their control.

The Skipper's Signature Scent:
P&G Old Spice

Recent restrictions placed by the IFRA on the use of what formerly were regarded as indispensable materials to the twentieth-century classic perfumes have produced a rash of reformulations, which may or may not have been undertaken first and foremost in order to comply with these industry standards. After all, reformulations were carried out by companies long before the IFRA began championing these restrictions—indeed, long before the IFRA existed.

All of this leads some critics to suspect that the IFRA serves the interests of those who stand to benefit from the progressively more abstract surrogates for natural materials being used in perfumery today. When self-appointed "experts" tout the allegedly superior quality of perfumes made with "abstract" florals, such as Estée Lauder Beyond Paradise, it is natural to be suspicious of their intentions, given the seemingly inexorable march forward in the twenty-first century toward maximum abstraction.

It's bound to be a lot less expensive to produce perfumes in a laboratory than it is to harvest tons of flower petals and extract from them the essence of the scent via a labor-intensive method such as enfleurage. Yes, abstract florals are superior from a purely business perspective, which sees only the bottom line. But our noses don't care about dollars and cents; they care about scents.

These sorts of fundamental changes—on the one hand, corporate control of houses; on the other other hand, a move to use more and more synthetic materials in modern perfumery—have generated a fair amount of disgruntlement among perfumistas and various kinds of response. Two very clear and distinct—and diametrically opposed—approaches have been marked out by a couple of my favorite perfume writers, Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos and Bigsly at Bigslyfragrance. If you have not yet had the pleasure of reading these gentlemen, I encourage you to visit their blogs where they have carefully and meticulously argued for their respective positions. I have certain sympathies with each of their approaches, but what I most love about reading them is that they offer so many intelligent reasons that I invariably find myself questioning my own beliefs and sometimes even swaying back and forth like a pendulum. It's great fun to read them because they disagree so deeply and yet both seem so eminently reasonable. It also does not hurt that they have excellent senses of humor...

Mr. Ross and Mr. Bigsly may not be philosophers by profession, but they are truly philosophical in spirit. They are what I call "olfactory truth seekers" because they relentlessly examine the state of perfumery through the application of their searching intellect to the many puzzles which arise as the terrain evolves incessantly. They are not engaging in this search for truth with any ulterior motive such as profit in mind. They are not shills, nor are they starf*cks. They call it as they see it, and although they disagree about nearly everything, they do so thoughtfully, offering reasons and adducing evidence for their bold contentions. It is refreshing to read what both of these thinkers have to say because, whether or not one agrees with their views, it cannot be denied that they are very well thought through.

I do not wish to summarize the perspectives of Bryan and Bigsly, only to encourage you to brew yourself up a stout cup of dark roast coffee and spend some time at their blogs. Here I prefer to generalize a bit, following the From Pyrgos and the Bigslyfragrance approaches to their farthest limits. I do not mean to suggest that the ideas which I shall discuss here are subscribed to precisely by either writer. In fact, the two approaches which I'd like to outline may be viewed as caricatures of sorts (hence, the selection of images, above...), lacking the subtlety to be found within their texts. My hope is to outline two general approaches which illustrate two different and very distinct tendencies: for and against sticking with tradition or, in the case of perfume, vintage.

That was then. This is now.

No one can deny that perfumery and perfumes have changed radically over the course of the past decade. Pre-Y2K perfumery arguably produced many if not mostly perfumes of integrity, which can be attributed in large part, in my view, to the very fact that they were composed over years by professional perfumers. Back then, a perfume launch was an event. Today, it is tantamount to a Tweet.

Post-Y2K perfumery is really all over the map, literally and figuratively. Not only has the perfumery branch of once-independent design houses been handed over to corporate giants, but at the same time, the niche scene has transformed beyond all recognition. Niche houses began, it is sometimes said, with L'Artisan Parfumeur back in the 1970s. At that time, "niche" meant “exclusive” and “difficult to find and access”. In the age of cybershopping, virtually nothing is difficult to find or access anymore. What, then, does it mean to be “niche”?

A further complicating factor is that at this point in history everyone and his mother, brother, cousin, and uncle appears to be jumping on the perfume business bandwagon, asserting their claim to a piece of the perfume pie as "creative directors" of “niche” firms. As a result, 'niche' has become more of a marketing term than anything else. Much niche (non-mainstream) perfume is relatively expensive, but the term can also be applied to some scattered houses offering less-expensive wares, including several of the traditional houses of France, some of which remain independent and based in and around Grasse. Houses such as Molinard and Fragonard appear to be overlooked by some snobs precisely because of the modest cost of their wares.

At the traditional and designer houses now under corporate control, such as LVMH-owned Guerlain and Christian Dior, there has been a radical increase in the number of launches, including seemingly endless lists of flankers and limited edition releases. In tandem, the number of new niche houses continues to augment, and each arrives on the scene touting the virtues and distinctness of their vision, with a slate of multiple, sometimes dozens of, perfumes. What to do?

One way of approaching the situation is to look back to the great classics, and track them down wherever they may be found. Vintage hunters spend untold amounts of time and energy in their quest for the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Often what they find is not gold but pyrite, but sometimes they have no way of knowing that this is the case because there is nothing to compare it to which might validate—or refute—the seller's claim to absolute integrity and authenticity. Nonetheless, the hunt continues.

Vintage hunting is to some a form of low-stakes gambling. Something about gambling appeals naturally to human beings, and for some people, hanging out at ebay and bidding in auctions is as much a form of entertainment as it is a way of acquiring vintage treasure. Of course, victory in this game is to have "scored" the rare and splendid jewel among the wide array of objects being sold there. Ebay has done a lot to make participation in the auctions a positive experience by implementing rules to prevent fraudulent transactions and protect consumers.

I have laid out the reasons for my skepticism about the general enterprise of hunting down remaining bottles of the vintage classics in The Question of Vintage. Probably my biggest concern regarding the hawks themselves is the very fact that people should be selling their supposed masterpieces and treasures at all. This implies that they are not great amateurs of perfume. But if they do not value perfume, then they may think that dilution or other other forms of tampering are perfectly fine. They may truly believe that “no one will notice” because they would not notice. Even stronger grounds for skepticism lie in the nature of the substances which make up perfumes: they degrade, and hence change, over time. It's anyone's guess what a perfume produced thirty years ago is going to smell like today, even if it was stored with the utmost vigilance and care.

Please note that I do not deny that, as a form of entertainment, ebay vintage hunting may have a value to the participant which transcends his or her ability to actually score great perfume. I have instead argued that there is something vaguely irrational about this hunt for treasure, given the nature, first, of perfumes, which fall apart over time; and second, sellers, who, being human beings, are subject to vices such as greed and unscrupulousness in their quest to maximize profit.

As a matter of fact, greed and unscrupulousness in the quest to maximize profit are the virtues of Gordon "Greed is Good" Gekko big corporate business types, precisely, I hasten to add, the types of people who head up conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble, Coty Prestige, Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, Puig, L'Oréal, and LVMH. They, too, may not care about the products which they peddle. They, too, may think that it is “no big deal” to remove all of the natural components from the Guerlain Aqua Allegoria launches. “No one will notice,” the person who makes such calls may mutter to himself as he issues an executive decree, in the hope of improving the company's bottom line.

A generally realistic view of human nature would seem to imply that any skepticism which one harbors about the shady gray market operators who trade in now-discontinued, once-classic perfumes, should transfer directly to the purveyors of perfume by the once-independent but now corporate-conglomerate-ruled design houses. Greed and unscrupulousness are everywhere, my fragrant friends, when money is what is at stake.

I part company with both the vintage hunters and those who "believe in" the possibility of relaunches of the classics by the companies currently holding the keys to the safes where perfume formulas are stored. Call me a cynic, but I trust neither the design houses under management by megacorporations, nor the peddlers of old vintage perfumes at ebay and elsewhere. And, with my solid background in chemistry, I found it preposterous that so few people acknowledge the reality of chemical degradation, which virtually guarantees that once-classic perfumes produced years ago are no longer the same.

Even when the peddlers are honest, they have no control over the condition of the perfumes which they peddle, which have changed hands many times over the course of the decades since the perfumes were produced, adding yet more cause for skepticism. As for the houses “under new management”: it's anyone's guess what the new boss thinks—or likes and values. Maybe he believes that Joy edp should be preserved in tact. Maybe he finds it stinky and will therefore order his minions to cut costs and “tame” the perfume in one fell reformulation.

We've seen plenty of blunders on the part LVMH, just to pick on them again. They discontinued nearly every Fendi perfume upon acquisition of that house. Clearly, someone did a miscalculation in cases such as Theorema. Perhaps the perfume did not do well because it was poorly distributed and marketed. Perhaps a more savvy marketing team could have squeezed some profit out of that beautiful perfume. No, the decision was made: destroy it. Now, if they announce that they are going to “bring back” Theorema, should we trust those very same decision makers? Or should we be skeptical that the same fools who axed the perfume in the first place (and therefore did not recognize its greatness), may also see nothing wrong with fobbing off a muzak version and calling it a relaunch of the original?

Who knows? Maybe the relaunches will be good. Once again, it's a numbers game, but when we see poor decision after poor decision being made by the powers that be (the renaming of Miss Dior Chérie as Miss Dior? Pray tell, whose call was that????), then it becomes less and less rational to believe that we should have any hope for anything that they will do in the future. This is not to deny outright that a relaunch might be good, but it is to predict, based on past behavior that it is not likely to be. That's just a question of probability based on prior experience. It's not irrational doom and gloom, it seems to me.

There are other possibilities as well. Should we perhaps hold out hope for tweaked relaunches of old classics and reformulations undertaken in order to appeal to new, modern sensibilities? This would seem to be an amalgamation of the vintage-valuing with the forward-looking approach, recognizing that "it's not 1988 anymore", but upholding the sanctity of the classics. The nature of consumerism has changed radically over the course of the past decade, with cybershopping achieving its furthest expression in the recent phenomenon of social shopping, made possible by the capitalization of sites such as Facebook and a general frenzy among cyberworld denizens to share with their "friends" everything they do, including buy.

Mrs. Howell's Signature Scent:
Why Chanel No 5, of course!

The same forward-looking attitude applies equally well, however, to the science of perfumery, as synthetic organic chemists endeavor to create new molecules for use in perfumes to supplant rare and expensive natural materials and also to create brand new scents. Indeed, the story of Chanel No 5 is that of a new idea applied to the perfume of its time. By adding aldehydes, never before successfully used (they had been used, but not widely), to a floral perfume, a classic icon of twentieth-century perfumery was born. Gabrielle Chanel proclaimed that women had no business smelling like flowers, and derided the “backwards” nineteenth-century soliflores dominating the perfume scene.

Maryann's Signature Scent:
Parfums Berdoues Violettes de Toulouse

There is a curious logical tension, it seems to me, in believing in the possibility of excellent relaunches of vintage classics, which seems to involve the very same nostalgia of which vintage hunters are sometimes accused. Should we really be wearing the perfumes of the twentieth century in the twenty-first century? Or is it not time to move on?

Like it or not, perfumery continues to march ahead and will soon be leaving "classics" such as Chanel No 5 behind—not only because using the precious jasmine of Grasse will be financially prohibitive from the perspective of the suits running the businesses, but also because consumers' preferences will continue to be transformed as new scents are created and widely marketed and disseminated in venues such as Sephora, which literally create tastes in mass market perfume.

Nowhere is the dependence of the range of perfumes available upon the whims of fashion—as molded by companies—better illustrated than in the current oud craze. The “need for oud” has been created out of nothing for people with no knowledge of that substance whatsoever by perfume companies! What next? Elves' sweat and fairies' breath?

The formidable forces of fashion explain how sweet laundry scents and gourmand and fruitchouli scents (in the model of Thierry Mugler Angel) before them flooded the market. Consumers came to view those types of scents as "appropriate" perfumes. The reason why people describe loud, megasillage perfumes as "so 1980s" is because back then people wore those scents, but very few people do today.

These changes took place not because Christian Dior Poison was objectively good twenty years ago and has now become objectively bad. No, this came about only because fashions change, and perfumery is part and parcel of fashion, as should be obvious by the very fact that so many clothing design houses launch perfumes as accessories of sorts, to embellish their line, not to replace it.

This also explains why designer after designer, beginning with Gabrielle Chanel, have handed over the perfumery end of their businesses to other parties to tend to. Fashion designers are first and foremost concerned with clothing, not perfume, so it is not that surprising that so many of them have handed over control of their perfumery branch to major corporations in the twenty-first century. From Calvin Klein to Fendi to Kenzo to Givenchy, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent, the perfumery end of things has been delegated to another entity, the multicorporate conglomerate.

The Third Way

If all of these people are selling their rights to control their perfume output, then whom ought we to trust? My view is that the way forward is not to hunt down decaying bottles of juice from times past, nor to hold out hope that the new corporate masters have any intrinsic interest in producing excellent perfume. The only people who really care about producing excellent perfume, in their heart of hearts, are perfumers. The third way which I propose today is to stick with the independents, where there really and truly is a perfumer in the house, not just a bunch of hired hack-chemists working under restrictions imposed upon them by their employer.

Independent perfumers offer us today the best hope of finding perfume which embodies the integrity found more often than not in early-twentieth century perfumery. Think about it: back then perfumers worked in small ateliers and both composed their elixirs and balanced their own books. They did not issue perfumes as frequently as Tweets. They invested time and energy in their creations rather than producing dozens of perfumes using combinatorial permutations of a set of fixed notes.

All of this may sound vaguely quaint in the twenty-first century, but independent perfumers represent the only case where we have rational grounds for believing that the fresh perfumes will not be either a con job (as in nasty, cheap, and insulting reformulations), or the creation of new tastes to shape a market solely for profit-making purposes (as in the case of launching the scents of laundry and personal hygiene products as perfumes).

There are no good reasons to cling religiously to vintage perfume nor to quixotically hope that the business people in charge of multicorporate conglomerates are somehow going to start caring more about matters olfactory than about their bottom line. Business is driven inexorably by a quest for profit. Nothing is sacred but the bottom line.

In making this proposal, I am emphatically not claiming that all niche houses are purveyors of excellent wares or perfumes of integrity, as I conceive of what all of us are really looking for in the end, whether we tend to look backward, forward, or around us right now. No, the niche scene is filled with façades in front of crass labs where, too, perfumes are being quickly composed and poured into fancy bottles and hyped in part by slapping on exorbitant price tags. So one must tread carefully in this realm as well. Many of the glut of current "niche" ventures will fold like a house of cards in a gust of wind, and their creative directors may move on to running fast-food franchises or selling real estate.

Nonetheless, within the vast sea of niche perfume being pumped out today, there are small islands of true perfumery, where people who are generally committed to producing beautiful things (and you may call them “artists” if you like, but you'll mean that in the pre-twentieth-century sense). That is where we are most likely to find the sorts of perfumes which vintage lovers remember and cherish as they slowly disappear, never to be replaced.

The Third Way, then, is not to look back to the past, nor to dream wistfully of the future, but to look into the true perfumers plying their trade at independent houses today. These people are much more believable than either the anonymous chemists composing at IFF or the “rock star” perfumers attaching their names to dozens of perfumes simultaneously across all categories. In many cases, “super-star” contracted perfumers appear to be signing off on perfumes which are then left to the chemists and accountants to modify with the aim of cutting costs. That would explain how some of the perfumes allegedly created by big names such as Calice Becker and Yann Vasnier are as mediocre as they come.

My advice, for those who wish to find the treasure at the end of the rainbow without having to travel back in time, and for those who are understandably skeptical about future “relaunches” of previously reformulated or discontinued perfumes—reformulated or discontinued in some cases by the very company claiming to be about to “bring them back”—is not to cling to the past, nor to hope for something logically possible but unlikely to occur. Instead, focus on the currently active and identifiable (not dead or anonymous) perfumers who run their own businesses and make their own creative decisions, over which no other person has veto power. There and there alone you will find the integrity of perfume still alive and well, and that is our best chance for finding great perfumes here and now, even today, in the ever-advancing age of abstraction.

Ginger's Signature Scent:
Keiko Mecheri A Fleur de Peau

Carpe Diem!

Screen captures were taken from Gilligan's Island, season 2, episodes 1 &2, 1965.

Is Mayotte Mahora? First sketch of an outline of a theory of perfume identity

How many times have I heard Guerlain Mahora denounced by perfumistas as an epic failure on the part of the otherwise venerable house of Guerlain? How many of those who parrot this refrain have even experienced the now-discontinued perfume? 

Mahora was launched in 1999 (according to the date on my bottles) but swiftly pulled from the counters and boutiques. How many times have I heard it said that Guerlain Mayotte, launched in 2006, is no more and no less than Mahora? In fact, the claim is frequently made that Mayotte is Mahora, albeit rebottled and sold under a new name, and this appears to be widely accepted as the truth.

Needless to say, the blogosphere- disseminated "factoids" to the effect that, first, Mahora is horrible and, second, Mayotte is Mahora, have left me puzzled and perplexed. I have been known to gush about Mahora, so the first and foremost source of my perplexity inheres in the simple fact that such an excellent perfume should be trashed so volubly by so many people. But there is more to my puzzlement than profound disagreement on a matter of taste. After all, the Mahora haters may well love Insolence, which at least in the eau de toilette form (I've yet to muster up the courage to try the eau de parfum), I find utterly repulsive. If so, then I can remind myself how very subjective perfume perception is, deriving a modicum of solace and comfort once more from the handy adage

One perfumista's treasure is another perfumista's trash.

That little piece of folk wisdom, however, is not enough to dispel the logical quandary posed by the second of the two claims, that Mayotte is in fact Mahora. On the face of it, the claim is preposterous, and I have never believed it to be true. Why? First, because if Mahora was a resounding market flop in part because of its "nasty" scent, then there would be nary a reason for Guerlain to have launched the "disaster" all over again. Would there?

Second, it has been brought to our collective attention that Guerlain has reformulated most if not all of their perfumes. Why would Mahora, even if under a pseudonym, not, too, have been put under the chemist/accountant's knife, all under the pretext of needing to comply with the IFRA?

There are a few possible responses to these concerns, commencing with the most obvious, that when Mahora was launched, Guerlain was still an independent house. Such apparent logical preposterousness would not be precluded in the least by Guerlain's new corporate master, LVMH, which after all is now infamous for having worked wonders for the house of Christian Dior by renaming Miss Dior Chérie as Miss Dior and Miss Dior as Miss Dior L'Originale, sowing confusion far and wide.  LVMH also appears to be responsible for the complete and utter perversion of the once-beautiful Aqua Allegoria line. In the wake of these sorts of wild and wacky business moves, it becomes difficult to insist that relaunching Mahora as Mayotte can only be written off as completely out of the question. Everything is permitted, it seems, chez LVMH, so why not that, too?

After all, it might be thought, or it might have been thought by the marketing gurus at Guerlain under the aegis of LVMH, that Mahora's real problem was her marketing campaign. Perhaps people were put off by the shiny-skinned naked model standing in an exotic scene before what looks to be a volcano in the middle of the desert and channeling perhaps the gods of Indian mythology. But wait, did not Tom Ford put naked flesh to good use in marketing the decidedly unedgy Tom Ford Cologne? 

Details, details. Are they or are they not the same?

The Proof is in the Juice?

Fortunately, there is no need to delve further into the inscrutably labyrinthine strategic cogitations of the marketing team at LVMH. Thanks to my perfume pal Andrew Buck at The Scentrist, who recently gave away a large bottle (125ml) of Mayotte, of which I was the lucky winner, I am able to compare the juice of Mahora to the juice of Mayotte side by side and decide whether or not they are the same. One nose, one set of skin, two bottles of juice. Are they the same?

HRH Emperor Oliver stands by, ready to assist in the definitive sniffing test

Let's begin with the visuals. The juice inside the Mahora and the Mayotte bottles is similarly colored and appears even to have approximately the same viscosity. I had remembered Mahora as having a thicker, more viscous texture, but as I compared the two perfumes, both at eau de parfum concentration, side by side, I recognized that my memory had built up Mahora in my mind as a golden elixir. In fact, it's just as watery looking as Mayotte. So are they then the same? Not so fast. Colored water is sometimes used to fill perfume bottles put on display. We cannot be sure that the juice is the same from the color alone.

The day I received my package from The Scentrist, upon my initial application of Mayotte, I was absolutely convinced that it was nothing like Mahora. In fact, I found Mayotte much closer to Versace Blonde! More animalic, more vague and cloudy, less golden and gleaming and glistening. Still, I could not be sure until comparing the juices side by side.

When I tried that, on a different day, I found that the opening of Mahora and the opening of Mayotte are not all that different, although Mahora does seem more sweet. The real story does not reveal itself until the drydown, when the two perfumes smell nothing alike. Mayotte  turns out to be rather linear, smelling more or less the same from start to finish, with only a diminution in strength until it finally fades away. 

Please rest assured that I sprayed the same amount of these perfumes on (Mahora on the left, Mayotte on the right), so the radical distinction in longevity, sillage, and trajectory cannot be explained away by spritz-versus-dab phenomenology. The Mayotte bottle does not have a sprayer, but I decanted the liquid into a purse spray vessel for the purpose of this comparison.

Mahora, in contrast to Mayotte, grows stronger and more luxuriant as it melds into the skin, which heats up the perfume to create a much bigger sillage than the perfume initially seemed to have. After a couple of hours, there is no comparison to be made whatsoever. At best, Mayotte can be read as a reformulation of Mahora, quite a bit weaker, and much less sweet and intoxicating. Mayotte is a pleasant enough tuberose scent, but it is not Mahora, the complex elixir which I fell in love with at first sniff and which I continue to love still today, long after my esteem for the house of Guerlain has dwindled to nearly nothing. Mahora is the last vestige of a by-gone era.

My conclusion: the two perfumes are not the same. But is my reasoning sound?

What are the criteria for identity in perfumery?

Perfumes, like persons, are rather complex things, ontologically speaking. What makes a perfume a perfume, and how do we decide that it is or is not the same as another? I argued above that Mayotte is not Mahora. The basis of my claim is that the two perfumes smell rather different, especially in the drydown.

It may be objected, however, that Mayotte is closer to Mahora than to any other Guerlain perfume. After all, there is a relative dearth of tuberose in the Guerlain line-up. Rose and vanilla abound, but tuberose? Perhaps that is what everyone who has propelled this falsehood far and wide, faster than the speed of sound and throughout the world wide web, really meant. Perhaps when people say "Mayotte is a relaunch of Mahora," they mean no more and no less than that Mayotte is a lot closer to the discontinued Mahora than it is to any of the extant creations, so it must be a relaunch of the same, more or less. 

Why get bogged down with picayune details? Hardly anyone knows what Mahora smells like anyway, and even fewer want to find out, now that it has been pervasively, and I dare say perniciously, denounced as the worst perfume ever to have been designed by Jean-Paul Guerlain. The received view appears to be that Jean-Paul Guerlain had a very bad nose day when he signed off on Mahora. I respectfully demur from the "conventional wisdom", needless to say.

If purveyors of the received view mean that Mayotte is "more or less" Mahora, then what they are perhaps saying is that Mayotte began in the lab as Mahora but then was reformulated. That would, in fact, make a lot of sense, given that Mahora was a market flop, and Guerlain has in any case reformulated just about everything else.

But if that is what happened, then why claim that Mayotte is Mahora in the first place? How can identifying a recent launch with a previously launched failure help anyone? Oh right, LVMH marches to the beat of their own drummer, which in their case means operating beyond the realm of logic. Has the conglomerate perhaps been infiltrated by spies from the competition, say, Procter & Gamble or Elizabeth Arden or Coty or Estée Lauder? On ne sait jamais...

I strongly suspect that the real reason why this falsehood has gained such traction is simply that the two perfumes do look similar, and they also smell similar in the opening minutes. Anyone who writes a review on the basis of the opening, without waiting around for the lengthy and complex drydown of Mahora—nonexistent for Mayotte—may easily conclude that the two perfumes are "more or less" the same, and depending upon their sensitivity, they may or may not notice the difference in sweetness between the two.

One thing, perhaps the only thing, of which we can be absolutely sure is that Mahora was never reformulated. It was launched and discontinued, thank goodness, I might add, since now when we score a bottle at least we know what's really inside, what certainly cannot be taken for granted in cases such as Shalimar, Samsara, Jicky, Mitsouko, and many other of the classic perfumes from the house of Guerlain.

I have based my judgment that Mayotte is not Mahora on the simplest of evidence: how the liquids in the bottles smell. In reality, perfume identity is not at all dependent upon scent, as odd as that may seem to those who pride themselves on learning as much as they possibly can about perfume. 

Clearly, the formula is not considered an essential part of the perfume. Why? Because countless perfumes bearing the same names have been serially reformulated. The scent of Coty Muguet des Bois has changed, but the name stays the same. The identity criteria are quite different in the case of perfume than they are in virtually any other realm. If a company owns a perfume formula, then they have the right to retain the name and fiddle with formula, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it.

By this logic, the only way that Mayotte could really be Mahora would be if Guerlain had kept the name Mahora and slapped it on the perfume instead of the name Mayotte. The two are not the same because the house says that they are not the same. By using a different name, Guerlain has stipulated that the perfumes are not identical. Mayotte is not a relaunch of Mahora, because only same-named perfumes can be relaunched.

That is all that perfume identity amounts to: the house and the name. No, wait! Even that is too much. Take cases such as Balenciaga Rumba. The formula for Rumba was sold to Ted Lapidus. They proceeded to reformulate the perfume, while still selling it in the same bottle, albeit with the house name Ted Lapidus replacing the house name Balenciaga. This is not a case where a corporate overlord has arrived on the scene to manage the company. No, Balenciaga still exists as a house, and it is not owned by Ted Lapidus. Balenciaga continues to launch new perfumes, but no longer owns Rumba. Balenciaga is owned by Coty, and Ted Lapidus is owned by the Jacques Bogart Group. (As far as I know, Coty does not own the Jacques Bogart Group. Perhaps it's on their future acquisition wish list?)

Yet Rumba continues to be sold as Rumba, despite the fact that Ted Lapidus completely reformulated the perfume, and the bottle emblazoned with the Ted Lapidus label now boasts completely different notes than did the Balenciaga original. This example shows that what matters is who owns the formula for a named perfume. They then own the name, and can at their caprice completely change the formula! Perfume names are no more and no less than brands. If a company decides that it will be more lucrative to completely transform "the product", as they view the matter, then they will. 

Perfumes, from the perspective of business people, are no more and no less than products. Mahora did not sell well, so Mahora was terminated with extreme prejudice. Mahora does not exist anymore, according to Guerlain itself, and for that reason Mayotte is not Mahora. The fact that different recipes were used to produce the two liquids is entirely beside the point. What matters is what the house says. Guerlain says that Mayotte is Mayotte. Guerlain ceased production of Mahora. Therefore, the two are not the same.

The nail in the coffin in this case is the simple fact that the official notes, provided by the house itself, are different for the two perfumes.

Mayotte

top: green notes

middle: frangipani, jasmine, neroli, tuberose, ylang-ylang

base: sandalwood, vanilla vetiver

Mahora

top: green notes, almond blossom, orange

middle: jasmine, neroli, tuberose, ylang-ylang

base: sandalwood, vanilla vetiver

Frangipani is listed for Mayotte, but not for Mahora. Almond blossom and orange are listed for Mahora but not for Mayotte. How, in the light of such evidence has this clear-cut case of false identity persisted for so long?

In fact, applying my well-intentioned but ultimately irrelevant olfactory test to any number of pairs of reformulated perfumes, one would conclude, erroneously, that they are not the same. That is to fall into a sort of fantasy world about perfumes, which do not exist as objects independent of the houses which produce them. The houses are the gods of the universe of perfumery, and the perfumes are at the complete and utter mercy of their gods. There are no Platonic Forms when it comes to perfume. There are only products being peddled to markets by hook or by crook.

The sort of deception which we deem unacceptable in our dealings with other human beings is the order of the day when it comes to the business world. The line between false advertising and seduction is impossible to locate when it comes to perfume, so long as its provenance is the house which owns the rights to the formula. By definition, Guerlain cannot commit fraud when it comes to their own perfumes, as odd as that may seem. They exhaustively define the parameters and contents of the microcosmic perfume universe coextensive with their house.

Whoever owns the formula of the juice, makes the rules.

The End of Perfumery as We Know It? A Ciceronian Response

The “-ization” of Perfumery

I love to explore perfumes by house. My preference is to experience a cluster of offerings and see whether there is a theme or an approach or a style running through them, such that it becomes possible for me to have a basic grasp of the house's outlook or vision. This is becoming more difficult to do than it was back in the twentieth century for houses such as Guerlain, Acqua di Parma, and Dior, for a variety of reasons. François Demarchy, the head perfumer at LVMH, signs the perfumes of some of the formerly independent houses now operating under the umbrella of the conglomerate. Guerlain, however, has changed quite a lot for another simple reason: Thierry Wasser is not Jean-Paul Guerlain. On top of all of this administrative upheaval, nearly all twentieth-century perfumes seem to have suffered under reformulation, as perfumers “struggle” (more on this below...) to comply with the restrictions imposed by first the IFRA and now the European Union.

Some of the smaller—but still relatively big—houses, too, have been subsumed under the management apparatus of larger companies with the result that the offerings of formerly independent lines such as Marc Jacobs and Vera Wang, both currently under the aegis of Coty Prestige, appear to be moving closer and closer together through a compositional convergence process which may have something to do with the now shared sources of aromachemicals being produced by and coming from the same factories. I have noticed some convergence of patterns in the cases of Jean Patou and Rochas as well, which seem to have begun when they were added to the Procter & Gamble portfolio. The way in which the perfumes under such corporate umbrellas are being marketed also appears to be undergoing a process of homogenization.

Similar forces may be acting upon Guerlain and Dior, despite the fact that the creative director is not the same in those two cases. In addition to owning Sephora, LVMH is the overlord of several other formerly independent and quite distinct houses as well. Some of the trends which I've noted, such as the use of solid plastic sample vials, are no doubt superficial. Someone at LVMH thinks that it's better to protect the liquid inside than to use transparent glass, despite what are arguably the latter's aesthetically superior properties and practical superiority to the consumer, insofar as it is possible to see exactly how much—if any—liquid is really contained within the vial. The opaque plastic sprayers often seem to be defective and even more often contain an unexpectedly small amount of perfume. But, again, these sorts of practical business matters do not necessarily reflect anything about what is going on at the perfume end of things.

However, other trends, such as the rampant flankers being launched after the namesakes of the once-classic perfumes of both Guerlain and Dior do seem to have effects upon the world of perfume proper. I have not seen any Mitsouko or Diorissimo flankers yet, but Shalimar and Addict flankers abound, and all of the newer perfumes seem to be launched in waves of flankers: Insolence, Insolence eau de toilette, My Insolence, Insolence Eau Glacée. Insolence Blooming, Insolence Shimmering Edition.... Idylle, Idylle eau de toilette, Idylle Eau Sublime, Idylle Duet Rose-Patchouli, Idylle Duet Jasmin-Lilas. Idylle extrait de parfum, ...

Shalimar and Flankers

The mediocre quality and staggering number of Shalimar flankers does not inspire confidence in the once-glorious house of Guerlain: Fleur de Shalimar, Eau de Shalimar 2008, Eau de Shalimar 2009, Shalimar Initial L'eau, Shalimar Parfum Initial, Shalimar Parfum Initial L'Eau Sensuel, Shalimar Black Mystery 2007, Shalimar Eau de Parfum 2009, Shalimar Edition Charmes Eau de Parfum, Shalimar Fourreau du Soir, Shalimar Légère, Shalimar Ode à la Vanille, Shalimar Ode à la Vanille Sur La Route de Madagascar, Shalimar Oiseau de Paradis, Shalimar Parfum Initial à Fleur de Peau, Shalimar Talisman Byzantin. Shalimar Yellow Gold.

All of this flanker folie might not be a matter of concern, were it not for the unfortunate fact that the once-classic perfumes, including the original Shalimar, all appear to have been serially reformulated and some appear even to exist simultaneously in different versions marketed to different niches. Do the Guerlain boutique bottles of Shalimar contain a different perfume than what is found at discount drugstores such as Walgreens and CVS? I suspect that they do, and rumors to that effect abound.

What in the world is going on here? Why would a company do such as thing? Well, because they know that most of the people who purchase perfume at the Guerlain boutique know a thing or two about perfume, or at the very least are used to wearing the real thing, not some muzak facsimile tantamount to a flagrant act of self-desecration. As versions proliferate, the Tower of Babel problem of communication—already bad, given that we all seem to have divergent tastes and variable sensitivities to the many different components of perfume—can only grow worse.

As a business strategy, I cannot find fault with the practice, if indeed it is one, at least not in the short term. In the long term, however, I fear that such tactics are bound to lead Guerlain down the not-so-felicitous path taken by Coty and Halston before them. Coty did manage, it appears, to rebound financially from its early missteps by creating the Coty Prestige division and acquiring many well-regarded designer names. But Coty renounced its status as a great perfume house long ago, and there has been no looking back. Coty is a successful company not for creating great perfumes—though they did once upon a time—but because they have managed to sell lots and lots of mid-range and bargain bin bottles to many, many people over the years.

Guerlain and Dior bore the cachet of exclusivity in the past, but that glory has been slowly abraded by their very own practices in recent years. True, each of these houses has its niche-esque branch producing exclusive perfumes targeting more sophisticated perfume users separately from their big-profit mainstream launches. Nonetheless, I am finding it harder and harder to take these niche-esque launches very seriously. Many of them strike me as little more than gimmicks.

Guerlain Muguet is sold only on May 12^th, for about $600 a bottle. Lily of the valley can only be constructed, so the perfume is obviously synthetic. No one is traveling to the ends of the earth to collect tiny, delicate, white bell-shaped lily of the valley cups for enfleurage in fresh goose fat by artisans back at Grasse. No, it is created in a lab. The mainstream launch Idylle is also a lily of the valley perfume, which costs about 10% of the price of the special edition “niche” perfume Muguet. I'm afraid that in this case I cannot find fault with one astute reviewer's plaint (at Fragrantica):

And I do think this "only for sale one day a year" concept is ridiculous. And for $580 it should include a big, juicy man to spray it on me whenever needed.

Guerlain issued a preemptive response to complaints on the part of such curmudgeons with this public relations statement to Allure magazine in May 2012:

"It's not the lily of the valley that's expensive; it's the addition of natural extracts," says perfumer Yves Cassar -- in this case, rose and jasmine. "These flowers require many petals to produce a tiny bit of oil."

Nice try. So why does this perfume cost five times more than either Nahéma or Chamade, both rose perfumes from the very same house? Why does it cost five times more than Chanel no 5, said to contain a fair dose of the precious natural jasmine of Grasse? In fairness, I should add that the 1,345 special edition bottles of Muguet for 2012 were decorated with “a removable green-glass-and-gold necklace from Gripoix, a 143-year-old jewelry house in France.” So the ultimate explanation of the price would seem to be not the natural jasmine and rose essences, but the bling.

At the same time that such gimmicks as necklace-wrapped bottles continue in a steady stream, the price of regular Guerlain perfumes has been plummeting, as they have flooded the discounter market. A 100ml bottle of Eau de Cologne Impériale can now be had for $40 or even $30, if one shops around. The Mitsouko reformulation, too, seems to be foundering, as bottles can be had at any of the discounters for a fraction of the original MSRP, which, I might add, was never anywhere near the prices being asked by Guerlain for the “niche” launches.

When I see such developments, I wonder, at the first level, how such companies can be both mainstream and niche, business savvy and artistically driven, at the very same time. The evidence is to me overwhelming that the suits have a lot more to say about what is going on at these houses than do the creative directors and the perfumers themselves. Or is that these days the creative directors and perfumers are business people first, and designers only second?

I also wonder about developments such as the “Private Label” phenomenon. Perhaps this idea originated at a board meeting of the Estée Lauder group, since not only the eponymous house but also that of Tom Ford, subsumed by the same group, have pursued this strategy with what appears to be resounding success. The first question which came to my mind upon encountering one of the Private Collection perfumes at Estée Lauder, Tuberose Gardenia, was: why do they cost more than the perfume whose name is Private Collection? Can someone please explain this to me?

To be honest, I've always found this sort of two-tier strategy to be in some ways preposterous. It may have started with Calvin Klein—a trendsetter in so many ways and in so many different realms, including perfume—who began mass-marketing jeans to a Levi's-obsessed culture now quite some time ago. Calvin Klein jeans never cost much more than Levi's, and yet they carried with them the prestige of a fashion designer, rather than the homey comfort of a dry goods store, and this, I believe was the secret to their success.

The colonization of the mass market by famous designers has approached ubiquity by now. But the nagging question remains: if a designer of haute couture has a line also at HLM or Target, does that not demonstrate that their designs can be effectively executed for very little money? So what accounts for the difference in price? In the case of perfume, the suggestion—usually implied but sometimes explicitly stated—is that the ingredients used in the “private” perfumes are far more costly and rare than those used in the “public” perfumes. Still, a puzzle remains: does not the success of the latter demonstrate that such costly ingredients are in fact dispensable, unnecessary to the production of great perfumes? Or perhaps the entire pretext is nothing but a lie. Think, again, of synthetic lily of the valley: how expensive can it possibly be?

Beyond the seeming illogic of claiming both exclusivity and accessibility to the masses under the very same label, I continue to wonder about it as a marketing strategy. I am reminded in some ways of Starbucks' decision to begin producing instant coffee, thereby cutting into their very own profits on the piping hot liquids served up at the cafés by real-live baristas. The explanation in that case is, I imagine, that some people are satisfied with instant coffee and prefer not to leave their homes or offices. But of course most people who drink instant coffee, drink cheap instant coffee, and the very thought of a cup of instant coffee may be anathema to those who drink real coffee such as Starbucks and related coffee dealers purvey. At the same time, the people who drink instant coffee are not about to pay $1 a cup to do so, which is about what the Starbucks packets cost at MSRP. Even purchased on sale, the packets cost multiple times that of a cup of Folgers or Taster's Choice crystals spooned from a glass jar.

Starbucks also partnered with Tassimo for a time (or maybe that's misleading, since they both appear to be owned by Kraft at this point, which for all I know may be owned by General Electric, which for all I know may have joined forces with Citibank by now...), offering coffee discs to be used in the home with the patented Tassimo machine to produce coffee said to be just as good as creations produced by live baristas at the store. I was “gifted” a Tassimo machine by the Gevalia company, oddly enough, after having ended my subscription to their coffee service some time before. The logic appeared to be to coax me back to Gevalia with this new machine, for which I would naturally need some discs, if I were to use it.

I did not bite, but I did indeed acquire some discs of Starbucks coffee and for a while was using the machine on days when I wanted a very quick and clean coffee preparation. The big virtue of the machine is that it produces no mess whatsoever, unlike my favored methods of pump expresso maker, Melitta drip filter, or Bodum French press. Is the coffee produced by a Tassimo machine as good as a fresh cup from Starbucks? No it is not, but it is pretty good, good enough, perhaps to have motivated Starbucks' termination of the relationship.

I was surprised to learn that Starbucks subsequently teamed up with Keurig, which has taken over the quick-brew-at-home market, it seems, though I must say that I was very unimpressed by the sample of Keurig coffee which I was offered one day when walking through Sears to enter the mall where I then proceeded to stop at Starbucks for a real cup of coffee.

What does any of this have to do with perfume? you may not without good reason be wondering. I see these as business tactics, one and all. I do not believe that Tom Ford Private Collection perfumes cost any more to produce than do Tom Ford Public Collection perfumes, though they cost four time more to own. I am basing this bold conjecture on a few recent testings of some of these perfumes, the most unbelievable of which to my nose was Tom Ford Neroli Portofino, a glorified version of Mauer & Wirtz 4711 Original Eau de Cologne. The two creations do not smell identical, and I own that the Tom Ford is probably a bit better, but it commands something like fifty times the price of the traditional eau de cologne launched back in 1792.

Perfumery Placed in Perspective

The “bling thing” obviously works, and I have no principled objection to bling, per se. While bling is not perfume, there are concept houses, I'm thinking especially of Bond no 9, for which bling is an essential part of their image. I don't have a problem with that. If bling makes some people happy, then bling is good. My point in the above critique is only that traditional houses such as Guerlain have been changing their strategies to focus more on bling and less on perfume.

Perfumery is firmly anchored in the world of companies and commodities. People buy and sell perfume just as they buy and sell any number of other things for all sorts of different reasons. What makes perfume unique among all commodities is that the liquids themselves—within the bottles, however they may be marketed—map out a distinct world of their own, a parallel universe, if you will: the olfactory universe. This is a universe unknown to the vast majority of people, because they do not think of perfume in any but functional terms.

The apparatus which sustains perfumery is intimately connected to this functional outlook, regardless of how religious perfumistas may begin to become about the object of their love. Perfume houses are run for the most part by business people, who enlist perfumers to produce market-worthy products for them to sell for profit. Many of these business people could be selling literally anything: zippers and buttons, cars and boats, cereal and milk.

This fact is easy to see in the strange partnerships formed in recent years as corporations have grown larger and larger, swallowing up all sorts of ostensibly disparate businesses into one über-entity with the power to squelch most competitors emerging from below. A favorite example of mine is Unilever. Believe it or not, Breyer's, once noted as an independent source of excellent ice cream, is produced by Unilever, famous especially for products such as body wash and deodorant.

In perfumery, one of the biggest stretches may be Procter & Gamble, which added the historic houses of Jean Patou and Rochas to its portfolio, leading many to fear the progressive toiletrification of the perfumes of those houses, a fear which may have been justified, given what happened in the reformulations of some of their perfumes. The general approach of the corporate sharks at places such as Proctor & Gamble and Unilever is ruthlessly to maximize profit. “Swim or sink” is the governing philosophy, and when a subsumed entity such as Rochas does not pull its weight, it will lose the protection of its “guardian” in short time, as was reported by some fragrance community members to have happened a while back, although this was never confirmed and may not be true... at least not yet.

These corporate realities are obviously not going away during our life time, but one nice thing about the world of perfumery is that it has an existence independent of that realm. There are no doubt plenty of perfume hacks, but there are also people who create beautiful perfume as an expression of their unique creativity. When the corporate takeovers begin to seem overwhelming, I pause to think always of the independent perfumers who against all odds continue to create original elixirs for us to enjoy. How they manage to stay solvent is a testimony not only to the excellence of their work but also to their belief in what they do.

I do not, however, naïvely believe that all niche houses are oriented toward the production of excellent perfume. My impression, especially in the last couple of years, is that self-proclaimed niche perfume houses have been rapidly proliferating like rabbits for the same reason that investors turned to cell phone developers some years back, anticipating the ever-greater role that such devices would play in people's lives. Being “niche” has itself become a sort of sales strategy or gimmick.

In the case of perfume, the advent of online fragrance community websites which permit people to converse and educate themselves about perfume has evidently been recognized by a number of savvy entrepreneurs, and new houses continue to emerge as the community of self-proclaimed perfumistas continues to expand. The avalanche of new launches is the result of a combination of factors, one of which is surely the sheer number of new niche houses whose ventures involve the production of a set of perfumes to coincide with the creation of the house.

I do not envy the struggle of artistically driven perfumers as their professional world becomes progressively populated by profit mongers who have arrived on the scene to seize upon this moment in history to benefit from this relatively new cultural fascination with perfume. The numbers are still small, relative to the other market niche populations for just about any other product, but the potential for growth is enormous, given the evident allure of perfume for people from all walks of life. The promotion of perfume as a luxury product potentially as profitable as upper-echelon timepieces or fine leather items—or even fine wine—does seem to hold a great deal of promise, in part because modern people have become fashioned to some extent into epicureans, unbeknownst to themselves.

Witness the very creation of the Food Network, an entire television channel dedicated to the art of food! Every middle class housewife today is familiar with trendy phrases for gourmet cuisine ingredients such as EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil), when only a couple of decades ago, those same women would have been firmly entrenched in Hamburger Helper and canned vegetables territory. The world of food has changed in part because of the opportunities laid out before us at supermarkets.

We can buy better food today for less money, and for this reason alone people's tastes have evolved. They may not change fundamentally—someone who hates anchovies or eggplant always did and always will—but the nuances and subtleties which even average people are now capable of appreciating has a great deal to do with what has been made available to them by business people attempting to profit from these new manufactured desires.

To return to the case of perfumery, I have to say that I do not understand many of the recent developments at all. Let's take, once again, the IFRA restrictions. As far as I know—and please correct me, if I am wrong—the IFRA is a self-regulating body comprising people from the perfume industry. So how can perfume houses blame the IFRA for the restrictions, if they are ultimately self-imposed? Now that government bureaucrats have gotten in on the regulation game, the rules are obviously going to change, and it's a whole different story when laws start being imposed with penalties for failure to comply. Nonetheless, before the bureaucrats began their officious meddling, the IFRA was a body of perfume professionals issuing guidelines to themselves, was it not?

All of this reminds me of a Twitter which I saw flitting about the world wide web a while back. Guerlain was sending out a message to the effect that Mitsouko was going to be reconstructed by Thierry Wasser and brought back to its former glory. Please correct me if I am confused in my logic here, but if it is true that it is possible to bring Mitsouko back to its former glory, then it is false that Guerlain was forced to reformulate the perfume as a result of the IFRA restrictions. By sending out that message, Guerlain effectively convicted itself of duplicity. Is it true, or is it not true that the mangling of Mitsouko was a result of an attempt to comply with IFRA restrictions? If it is possible to bring the perfume back to its former glory, then it is obviously false that it was ever necessary to mangle it in the first place. QED.

A Ciceronian Response

Enough lamentations. There is probably little if anything that any of us perfumistas can do to stop any of the above enumerated nonsense. The time has arrived at last, therefore, to adopt the approach of Cicero—both a Stoic philosopher and a statesman—and invert the Necker cube or switch our attention to the bottle half full. When one recognizes that one has no power to change the circumstances in which one is mired, it becomes time to change one's attitude toward those circumstances and to adopt a new perspective. I am happy to be able to share with you, my fragrant friends, that I recently experienced an epiphany of sorts which resolved all of the above quandaries in one fell swoop.

Flankers and multilaunchers and corporate conglomerate homogenization continue on, but we can adjust our attitude toward perfume just as easily as the big houses can pump out swill. It may sound bizarre at first, but the truth is that the bottle half empty is also half full, for our lives can be enriched by availing ourselves of the opportunities for enhanced olfactory experience afforded by the sheer fact that niche perfumery has become viewed by business people as a profitable endeavor over the past few years. All of the above complaints about the state of perfumery commence from a fundamental confusion: in reality, we do not love perfume, but individual perfumes. We do not love humanity, but human beings. We do not love perfumery, but some of the products of the enterprise of perfumery.

Out of all of the perfumes being produced at any given time, we can and do love only a few. So why should thousands of irrelevant and gimmick-laden launches matter to us in the least? So long as there are a few hold-outs—and there are—perfumers who continue to create the sorts of elixirs which we prefer to wear, is there any harm in millions of gallons of vat-produced chemical soup being pumped out at factories and poured into garish hat-topped flasks? Do we complain about the existence of Spam and pork rinds, though we would never eat them? Of course not.

The massive increase in perfume production in recent years is analogous to the explosion in recent decades in interest in wine, especially in the United States. While wine has a rich history in Europe, it took a while for it to be recognized as the beverage of choice to be imbibed with meals in this country. Today, wine connoisseurs abound, and perfume connoisseurs, too, are on the rise, for the very same reason. We are fortunate, I believe, to have these new universes to explore, and I mean that quite literally.

The olfactory universe has always been filled with smells, but in recent times it has become inhabited by more and more perfumes. We can travel through the olfactory universe by sniffing perfumes one after the other and pushing another pin into the grand olfactory map, penning reviews along the way. In this way of viewing perfume testing, not every perfume is a “final destination”, a place where we feel prepared to hang our hat for more than a very short time. No, the new, ever-more densely populated perfume world is full of dead ends and dark alleys. But how could it not be? So is the real world. We can travel through both of these universes with the expectation of learning more about ourselves and the inhabitants of these worlds. We may not need to revisit some of the places we've been, but we will have grown through the journey itself.

Just as world travel is not the same thing as looking for a home, we can test perfumes for the experience and then move on. The fact that a place to which I have traveled is “a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there” does not make it any less valuable to have seen. And the same is true for perfumes which I may never choose to wear again, but from which I learned something though I wore it only once, even if only that I immensely dislike a certain combination of notes.

Perfumes and places and persons are all analogous in this regard, which can be seen by considering a third metaphor, that of personal relationships. We do not wish to marry every person whom we meet. Nor do heterosexuals or homosexuals wish to marry half the people whom they meet. Indeed, most of the people whom we will ever encounter will not rise above the status of passing acquaintance. We can regard perfumes in precisely the same way.

There are people who still today prefer to have a single signature scent, but perfumistas seem to be considerably more promiscuous, always on the look out for new prospects, so to speak. The fragrance community websites and Facebook groups devoted to the discussion of perfume are all encouraged by the unending flux of new perfume being poured out by the ever-expanding legion of houses.

For those of use who have moved beyond “perfume monogamy”—a strict loyalty to a single perfume or brand—the recent developments in the perfume industry, whereby some houses and perfumes may fall from our favor, simply opens up new avenues. Divorce is sometimes a good thing, permitting us to exit one chapter of our life in order to embark upon a new journey. Perfumes are destinations in one sense, but perfume testing is a journey, and we should perhaps be relieved that the vast majority of perfumes which we “visit” and “meet” are “places” and “persons” which we can do quite well without encountering ever again.

What makes a perfume special is that it stands out from the crowd. What makes the pursuit worthy is because it is so challenging in a sea of mediocrity to find something worth our sustained attention. The world is filled with things of every conceivable quality. It's up to each person to sift the proverbial wheat from the chaff and to select and distinguish true friends from everyone else. We will not and should not agree about which qualities mark a person or a place or a perfume as special. That's the beauty of heterogeneity and a reflection of human liberty.