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.
