Entry #21: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

a priori, a posteriori

The expression a priori is used by native French speakers in everyday discourse to mean something like "ahead of time" or "in advance", but among English speakers it is much less common and sounds very sophisticated and recherché. In fact, the only people I know who use the expression are philosophers.

In philosophy, a priori is contrasted to a posteriori and there's a lot of controversy specifically about a priori knowledge, which would be knowledge "before or without" experience. I know, it sounds impossible. How could you have knowledge of anything unless your neurons were firing? But isn't that an experience? Really the terms are meant to separate the sort of knowledge which is dependent upon the contingent way which the world happens to be, and knowledge which is independent of such historical fortuities.

One example would be the truths of mathematics or logic. Presumably they would still be true even if all of chemistry was completely different so that the most common atoms in our bodies were not carbon and hydrogen but WOEIFWI and XKCNQ. Anywhere in the universe, presumably, 1 + 1 = 2.

Do we have any a priori knowledge of perfume? Evidently not. It's all a posteriori, though we might base predictions on past experience. When people grumble about a reformulation which they assume is going to be bad, they are not grumbling on the basis of a sensory experience of the new version, but because they have been disappointed in the past, with other cases of reformulation, and they expect that this reformulation, too, will be bad.

What is the basis of that belief? It's not entirely irrational, because it commences from a recognition of certain trends in the perfume industry--which is based on experience. So a conjecture about a perfume yet to be experienced is based upon empirical information. I don't want to say that it's knowledge, because that's another whole huge controversy. This information strikes me as true: new fragrances, on the whole, are becoming more abstract and simpler than they were in the twentieth century.

FRAGRANCE IS FUNCTIONAL: How I learned to stop worrying about art and enjoy my perfume for what it is

Summertime presents a propitious opportunity to reflect upon the nature of perfume. Why? Because it's damned hot outside—at least here in Boston—and a good cologne can vastly improve one's oppressive and muggy and sweaty and otherwise unpleasant afternoon. How does cologne work its mood-elevating magic?

First off, it smells good. From bright citrus to clean musk to grassy green to violet leaf and lightly spiced tea, colognes manage to cover the gamut of scents found in the larger olfactory sphere spanning all perfumes, but the lower percentage of key ingredients makes cologne perfect for the summer months.

Yes, cologne cools and refreshes the body, particularly when applied as a splash, which is possible because of the lower concentrations of scent-making ingredients. More of the liquid which hits the skin is alcohol and water, proving yet again that hydration is good. With a few spritzes or a gentle splash, the spirit is immediately renewed as the air spinning off that ceiling fan suddenly seems twenty degrees cooler than it did. The action of the fan and the cologne are collaborating in a small piece of deceit: neither changes the temperature of the ambient air in the room, but together they fool the body into feeling much cooler than it was before.

My favorite colognes are those featuring a large percentage—preferably 100%—of natural ingredients. That's because in extreme weather conditions newfangled chemical soups sometimes morph in unexpected ways, just as I imagine perfumes do more generally when exposed to heat and light. Because the temperature is elevated even while the cologne is worn, I have found that the more natural it is, the better it tends to hold together and consistently smell nice. 

Cologne used in this way is obviously functional fragrance. Is it anything else? To be honest, my unedited response to this question is: Who cares? Is not fulfilling one important function enough to justify the existence of cologne? Why must it also be something else? Who says that it must be, and why?

I began thinking about this question recently while soaking in a scented tub and listening to one of Beethoven's string quartets. It suddenly dawned on me how much more complex and interesting even a single passage from a work of classical music is than even the most complicated of perfumes. Sure some of them (albeit fewer and fewer these days...) unfurl in interesting ways, transforming from one to another scent over the course of a wear.

In the most dynamic of cases, the perfume may undulate as its component scents wax and wane, leading one's nose to take note of different features of the composition at different moments in time and permitting a form of olfactory reflection and refraction to take place. But even in those rare cases of the most complex of perfumes, probably the closest comparison to complexity in music would be something along the lines of a four-chord pop song.

Perfume simply cannot, even in principle, scale the heights achieved by music, first, because it is so much simpler and, second, because our perception of it is so very subjective. I admit that I am pianist, trained in classical repertoire, and so my apparent disparagement or belittling of perfume may seem unfair to someone who, instead, has spent his life creating new combinations of scents. There may be some truth to that criticism, but I still believe that a finished perfume is considerably less interesting than any sonata or ballade, or prélude or mazurka or étude—or even two-part invention by J.S. Bach. I truly believe that even the profoundest of perfumes is nowhere near as interesting as even the simplest piece of music which I've ever played or heard.

Perfume is there to be enjoyed, a number of scents combined together in a small volume of space and usually not found together in exactly that way in nature. (Exceptions to the rule include realistic soliflores.) If masterfully composed, the combination of these scents will play out over time, but there is nothing even approaching tonal counterpoint to be found in a bottle of perfume. Even worse, owing to a variety of features peculiar to perfume perception in human beings, we cannot even seem to agree what we are talking about!

In approaching music, we have something to point to. There are key signatures and tempos and voices and refrains and codas. These are all written right there into the score, so no one can deny their presence. We can have a conversation about all of those aspects of music in the way in which we cannot so much when it comes to perfume because people do not even agree about what they smell, and its significance appears clearly to be determined by their idiosyncratic past history, values, and beliefs.

Judging by the reviews I've seen online, many people are affected by the note pyramids offered up by the house, even though it seems obvious that they are often a part of marketing the perfume and may or may not have any objective validity. My distinct impression is that many reviewers feel that they must perceive the official notes, and this may lead them to offer a narrative about the perfume which features those notes, even in those cases—such as highly abstract designer fragrances—where nothing even approaching the essences of the named flowers is present. What is in the bottle does matter, but it is mediated through an amalgamation of entirely subjective associations—and market-induced expectations. People are influenced to different degrees by marketing, and since no one else has lived our own life or walked in our shoes, no one else will perceive a perfume in exactly the same way that we do. Yes, you can tell a story about a perfume, but 99% of it derives from inside your head.

One might retort that the same can be said about music, which is just as subjectively processed, and it is true that people have different tastes in music and different levels of sophistication when it comes to understanding music theoretically. But two people who have been trained classically—say, two pianists—can talk about the objective features of a sonata written into the score. In stark contrast, two equally knowledgeable perfumistas may or may not agree about what they smell or whether it is any good.

While sitting in my tub listening to beautiful music and enjoying a pleasant scent wafting off the water, it occurred to me that the value of perfume has absolutely nothing to do with whether it will ever be exalted as one of the beaux arts by Western culture. It simply does not matter, at the end of the day, because the only reason why I really care about perfume is because I use it. My enjoyment of perfume is not different in kind from my enjoyment of the scent wafting off the bath water, even though the two scents may have been produced in entirely different ways.

Let me repeat the above confession: I use perfume, and I value it only insofar as it serves my purposes. It has no importance beyond its capacity to serve my purposes, to be used by me. A perfume never spritzed may as well not exist. I use perfume to scent myself, to cool off, to derive a sense of pleasure. But wait, there's more.

Not that we need any more, but I came up with a new argument against the “Perfumery is art” thesis. Here's how it goes: Home fragrance is functional. But home fragrance differs from perfume not in kind but in degree. We occupy our home, and when we wear perfume we may serve the same function as a scented candle to those around us—and also to ourselves. I have many niche candles: Diptyque, L'Artisan Parfumeur, Sage, Bond no 9, elizabethW, Etro, and all of them smell every bit as splendid as the perfumes of those houses which they feature. 

At the other end of the home fragrance spectrum are found Febreeze spray, Yankee candles, Wick plug-ins, and the like. If we allow that niche candles are art, then how to exclude all of these less noble forms of home fragrance? And if we deny that niche candles are art, must we not deny that the fragrances which scent them are as well? So here we have another conundrum, beyond the concerns so incisively articulated by Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos and Christos at Memory of Scent.

While thinking about this issue again, in the light of recent developments in perfumery, I also began to realize that even if perfumery could be considered art in some rare cases, it will never be recognized as such, in a general way, for the following reasons deriving from the current state of Western civilization:

1. Reformulation. Whether because of the IFRA restrictions (and now IFRA-inspired EU regulations) or for more crassly economic reasons, the once-classic perfumes have undergone vast changes in composition. The same names are being used in most cases (one exception being Christian Dior Miss Dior), but for the most part, the perfume bearing the name of an icon from the twentieth century has changed enough to make it impossible to say much about that perfume in a general way. Yes, once upon a time it was rich and had incredible depth. Yes, today it may seem flatter and less inspired, but people will continue to buy it because its reputation precedes it, and people's reception is informed by what they are told that they ought to believe. In order for objective masterpieces of perfume art to be exalted by posterity, they must exist in the same form as they existed when earlier writers described them. Does the Osmothèque solve this problem? I think not, but that's another story.

2. House management. The twenty-first-century phenomenon of corporate conglomeratization has affected many aspects of business in all realms of consumer goods, but the implications may be starkest of all in the case of perfume. Why? Because the answers to all of the key questions determining the fate of a perfume are made by managers who may or may not have any interest in preserving the original perfume intact. Publicly traded companies, as Coty recently became, are beholden to stockholders, and healthy profit margins become essential if a manager is to retain his position, as all of them obviously seek to do (unless of course they resign).

Such a manager will do what needs to be done to see to it that the stockholders are happy with the way the business is being run. Stockholders in Coty may or may not care about the intrinsic quality of the products. Many people in the world could not care less about perfume, and CEOs may in some cases number among them. The only thing that we can really count on is that if quality happens to translate into sales, then quality will be regarded by managers as good. If, on the other hand, quality eats into profits, then it must be sacrificed. If it becomes more profitable to sell many bottles at a lower price than fewer bottles at a higher price, then the formula will be cheapened. 

The stockholders of companies, in their capacity as stockholders—and whatever their personal feelings about perfume may be—want profit . Perhaps as individual consumers they appreciate perfume, but they'll have no problem with procuring their fine perfume elsewhere, using the funds which they reap from whatever it is that Coty does to maximize profit in the case of its various subsumed brands.

3. Niche houses—and autodidact perfumers—today abound and continue to proliferate. This niche perfumery industry has obviously proven to be profitable, requires little initial outlay or even professional training, and gives the power to create and profit from the fruits of one's labor even with no background or history in the area. It's remarkable, actually, the marked distinction between perfumery and the (other) arts in this regard.

No one decides as a result of a mid-life crisis (or reasonable facsimile) that the time has arrived to become a concert pianist, though one never took any piano lessons as a child or adolescent. To publicly profess such a plan would probably be taken as a sign of mental instability, even delusions of grandeur. Accomplished pianists have spent years upon years training to achieve even basic competency, and even more years to achieve the skill of a master pianist. In perfumery in the past, more or less the same situation appears to have obtained, which is probably why so many perfumers were born into families whose business it was to produce perfume.

In the past, during the golden age of perfumery, the skill of a trained perfumer was handed down from generation to generation, not claimed to be acquired in a short period of time by someone who liked perfume and decided to try to make some from an assortment of fragrance and essential oils which he began mixing together in his kitchen or garage. Just as a fondness for instrumental music does not alone suffice to make one a skilled musician, is it not rather pretentious and insulting to the history of perfumery (not to mention unrealistic) to suppose that one can simply “decide,” with no prior education or experience in the subject, to be a perfumer, in fact, next week?

But anyone has the right to pick up a paintbrush and take a stab at landscape or portrait painting, so why should aspiring perfumers not be able to do the same? one may well rejoinder. People can do such things, of course, but the lack of training and attention to detail of a professional perfumer will likely be missing. For this reason, among others, I believe that most of the current niche firms will cease to exist in short order. Some of these people will decide to move on, perhaps to obtain a realtor's license or to open up a fast-food franchise store. With so many choices, so many established and very fine perfumers who have dedicated their lives to perfecting their craft, why should consumers invest their modest wallet share in the work of dilettantes? The answer is clear...

4. Hype is what appears above all to sell perfume in the twenty-first century. New is good, everyone seems to assume. The next big thing is always just around the bend, and people are willing to invest large sums of money to own bottles of the latest “it” perfume. Once they have invested, they become more apt to defend the integrity of their acquisition, so as not to feel like a dupe.

Given the current state of the industry, it seems safe to say that the golden age of perfumery is behind us. Why? Because most perfumes produced today are simple, linear, and abstract. They are essentially mixtures of a few components to produce a “pleasant” scent. Perfume making in the age of the multilaunchers, who put out several or even dozens of perfumes at a time, has become a matter of mixing a set number of ingredients together in every conceivable logical combination. Lego perfumery is not the exception but the rule.

This, my fragrant friends, is what the business of perfumery has become, and it is hard to see how anything might reverse the seemingly inexorable forward-marching trajectory to greater simplicity and more cost-effective and abstract scents. Because nearly everyone in the mainstream is doing this--and many in the niche category as well--anyone concerned to survive in the competitive market must do the same, and all the more because modern people's tastes are being transformed in the process. 

Not so long ago, the house of Clean hit on a market-viable idea: give all people, including those who have previously shunned perfumes, a product which they can feel comfortable with. How could anything be more naturally and intuitively appealing than the scent of being clean? Today abstract sweet laundry and shampoo and conditioner scents are being sold as perfumes. The process by which this "clean agenda" is being inculcated in modern consumers is precisely the same as the process by which Gabrielle Chanel convinced women that they should smell like aldehydes: seduction.

Market forces and consumer behavior are mutually reinforcing. When consumers are essentially told that good perfume is clean and simple and abstract, then that becomes their concept of perfume. Now that the companies holding the key formulas of the classic perfumes of the twentieth-century have capitulated to the “modern way,” we appear to be moving more and more toward a toiletry-centric conception of perfume, which will become less not more expensive and comprise a large number of "temporary" fragrances whose market life can be expected to become shorter and shorter in the age of Twitter launches and flankers. 

Given this state of affairs, I see no hope for the vindication of the "perfumery is art" thesis. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, as things currently stand, the art thesis is no more and no less than a marketing tack used by exclusive niche houses. It adds an extra appeal to some sorts of consumers not unlike the appeal enjoyed by a perfume which is explicitly associated with a celebrity's name. It's probably not a coincidence that the celebrity phenomenon has infected niche perfumery as well, with “rock star” perfumers worshiped by throngs of fawning perfumistas, when in fact most such perfumers are simply doing their job!

So there you have it, my fragrant friends, how I learned to stop worrying about art and enjoy my perfume for what it really is: functional fragrance. If we are honest with ourselves, we must own that, in our day-to-day use of perfume, the art question does not matter in the least. So long as we are able to use our perfume to serve our own purposes, then we'll continue to be happy that it exists. Calling our favorite perfumes "works of art" adds nothing to them whatsoever. They are what they are: collections of scents which fill us with delight whenever we wear and smell them.

Now I do believe that it is time for a bath.

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.

Entry #17: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

This collage/mosaic of HRH Emperor Oliver was produced using the open source software program AndreaMosaic

Leibniz' Law

For any two things X and Y, X is equivalent to Y 

if and only if every property of X is a property of Y, 

and every property of Y is a property of X.

It might seem on its face that Leibniz' Law is being violated left and right in the age of reformulation. Nina Ricci L'Air du Temps is no longer L'Air du Temps, because the properties of the early and the more recent perfume bearing that same name are not one and the same. The ingredients have changed, in this particular case, a lot.

What's in a name? I discovered through an auto-Google that my given name is shared by several other people in the United States. I was surprised by this, as my name is not Jane Doe, and it seemed hard to believe that my first name would be attached to the same last name in so many other cases. But it was. As a result, multiple entities bearing no resemblance to me share my name.

The same can be said for sherapop, of course. Who is sherapop? Is she the princess of power? Or is she the philosopher of perfume? Or is she the philosopher of power? Or is she the princess of perfume?

All of these examples illustrate nothing really, because no one ever said that the same name could not be attached to two very different things. An interesting example in natural language is the string of letters g-i-f-t. Gift means present or wife or poison, depending on the language, and most people would consider those three to be very different things!

When a perfume company retains the name of a classic perfume for a less expensive or "re-imagined for the modern wearer" reformulation, have they violated Leibniz' Law? Not exactly, but they are banking (literally) on the fact that consumers will assume that the praise enjoyed by the earlier perfume is shared, transitively, as it were, by the newer perfume. 

In fact, the praise only applies or applied to the perfume actually sniffed, and when the two are dramatically different, then speaking of them as the same thing is rather like speaking of the very different people bearing my given name as one and the same, which is absurd. I do not deserve credit or blame for anything done by anyone else bearing my name. 

Names are crude bookkeeping devices, no more and no less, but they can be and are used by marketers to a company's advantage. 

Entry #16: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Ontology, Ontological, Ontologist

A few entries back I boldly asserted that epistemology and phenomenology were the two most reviled philosophical terms. What was I thinking? Even philosophers hate the word ontology! "Ontology, schmontology," has often been muttered by lovers of Quine and scientistic types more generally. The science worshipers and analytic philosophers (not quite coextensive, but close enough), all roll their eyes whenever anyone expresses an interest in the topic of ontology. So what is it, exactly?

We covered the basics of ontology in the episode of The History of Philosophy Refracted through Perfume dedicated to Parmenides, an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher who was the ontologist to end all ontologists. The key concept for Parmenides was Being. Ontology is the study of Being. And, yes, I do believe that it is supposed to be capitalized, to underscore its importance. So what, exactly, is Being? To be or not to be, that is the question, and it's a lot more profound that you might initially have thought. 

To begin with, what are the things in reality? Sounds easy, right? There are chairs, and there are tables, and there are bottles. Now we come to perfumes. Are there individual perfumes? Perfumes actually perfectly reflect the profundity of ontological studies. What makes a perfume a perfume, after all? When and how does a perfume come to exist? 

In terms of chemistry, a perfume is made up of a bunch of molecules. All of the ingredients on the label, including the mystery ingredient parfum, which especially distinguishes a perfume from all others, are components which, before being mixed together are other things: alcohol, eugenol, linalool, geraniol, the list goes on and on. So in mixing a bunch of different substances together, a perfumer ends up creating something new, a perfume which did not exist before. This is a grand creation act. How can a mere human being create new objects in reality? Perfumers appear to do it all the time. Chanel no 5 did not exist, and then suddenly, thanks to Ernest Beaux and Gabrielle Chanel, it did.

But are these new perfumes really real? Or are they not merely a part of the unstable world of becoming? That was essentially Parmenides' view. All of the change and movement which we observe in reality is illusory. There is only one real thing, and that is Being. Ontology is the study of Being, but since there is only one real thing, Being, nothing can be said about it, since any spoken words are going to divide up reality into pieces. 

Understood in the Parmenidean sense, ontology digs deeper than metaphysics, which is still concerned with cause and effect and ultimate divisions between things, even if those things cannot be accessed through empirical means. Ontology, my fragrant friends, is deep, and I suspect that at least some ontologists throughout history have grasped Being only under the influence of powerfully psychomimetic drugs. For now, we are mired in the world of becoming, which is of course why we are functional. 

We do distinguish things from one another in what we perceive to be reality. Not all perfumes are the same. Perhaps if we were enlightened enough, we would cease making any distinctions whatsoever. For now, let's just keep reviewing all of the different perfumes which we believe ourselves to be encountering while we wallow our way through the shadowy world of becoming.

I will say that when I see the tsunami of new niche launches, I start to understand the appeal of the simpler approach. Is every single possible combination of any possible liquid substances a perfume? Are there then infinitely many perfumes? Apparently so, if the behavior of the multilaunchers means anything. So long as they can keep coming with new names—often through the use, it seems, of random name generators—then they can continue to christen new perfumes. 

We sometimes identify perfumes as very similar to already existent perfumes, but as the grand map of the olfactory world becomes populated with more and more perfumes, at some point there will cease to be any iconic perfumes. At that point, perhaps, we will all be carried away in a sea of perfumes, the names of which will cease to matter anymore.  

If we could adopt the perspective of Parmenides, we'd be cured forever of our disappointment and anger over reformulated perfumes. They were never real to begin with, so how could they be any less real today than they ever were? Mitsouko was always an illusion.

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.