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April 2th, 2009 3:03 AM Scent Notes \| Cuir Ottoman by Parfum d’Empire **** By Chandler Burr
	Parfum d’Empire is a niche Parisian label run by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, its owner, creative director and perfumer. A Corsican, Corticchiato has a love of the intense smells of islands — hot dust, sea salt, smoke, arid maritime plants. He also has a fascination with empire, which may be genetic: Corsica has been violently traded between warring powers for centuries, and the island has enjoyed a Mediterranean-side seat to the rises and falls of numerous empires, from Greek to Roman to French. In 1769, Corsica contributed to the last of these a boy named Napoleon, the future Empereur des Français, born in the port town of Ajaccio. The house’s guiding creative concept is the scent of empires long disappeared, and even the scent of the people and things that built them: Equistrius is Corticchiato’s homage to the horse, the noble animal without which the world’s empires (save possibly the current, declining American version) would not have existed. Fougère Bengale is the smell of the great Islamic Mughal Empire, begun in 1526 and ended in 1857, when the Indian subcontinent passed under the rule of Imperial Britain and Victoria, Empress of India. Iskander is the name the defeated Persian Empire gave its conqueror, the Greek warrior Alexander. It’s as if Corticchiato were creating a wearable Wikipedia of military history. Not all men love the scent of leather. Perfumers create it using the smoky, hot-asphalt smell of birch tar, pyrazines (think pyromaniac in molecular form) and isoquinolines. This takes some getting used to. Putting on Andy Tauer’s Lonestar Memories — the smell of smoking tar and mesquite charcoal lingering on a cowboy’s saddle — is like bungee jumping into a volcano. Lancôme’s Cuir (”cuir” means leather in French) and Chanel’s Cuir de Russie are leather made more seductive, and Hermès’s breathtaking recent leather, Kelly Calèche, is one of the loveliest, most ingenious perfumes in decades: a supple, luxurious leather band, tanned and oiled, wrapped around a crystal vase holding subtle spring flowers. Corticchiato’s approach, Cuir Ottoman, is less brutal than Tauer’s, less luxurious than Chanel’s and more butch than Hermès’s. Here is a true-to-life leather, a literalist work of art. I have no idea whether the leather used by Ottoman rulers was cured in some particularly pleasant manner, but this leather is wonderfully present and tactile, the scent of straps that held a sheath, or perhaps a sandal in the Sultan’s Topkapi Palace, meant to be slipped onto the delicate, perfumed foot of a harem girl. Put on Cuir Ottoman and smell your arm: the leather sandal, fragrant as a flower, softly heated in the sun, waits for the girl.

May 15th, 2008 6:04 PM Scent Notes \| Fracas ***** By Chandler Burr
	There are perfume legends, there are perfumer legends, and then there are perfumes that become obsessions. Fracas is all three, which is a hat trick less common that you’d think. Still more extraordinary, Fracas is built on a concept of tuberose, a small white flower (unrelated to rose; the name comes from the Latin word describing the plant’s tuberous root system) that generates an overpowering scent and is notorious among perfumers for being a difficult raw material to master. Which is perhaps why Fracas’s perfumer, Germaine Cellier, managed it. Born in Bordeaux in 1909, Cellier was a pioneer in every sense: a professional woman, a chemist, an artist working in the olfactory medium, tall, beautiful, abrasive (and possibly lesbian), a brilliant and intellectually voracious friend of Cocteau, a proponent of synthetic raw materials. She was also the creator of a striking style. “She transposed Fauvism and Abstractionism into perfume,” Jeannine Mongin has written. “She created in dissonance.” And the creations have lasted. During WWII, the designer Robert Piguet asked Cellier for a perfume. She created Bandit for him in 1944. In 1946, she did Coeur Joie for Nina Ricci, and in 1947 the landmark Vent Vert for Balmain. Then Piguet asked her for another scent. It is possible that the secret of Fracas (1948) is an equilibrium between the power of Cellier’s style and the power of tuberose. Perfumer Aurelien Guichard is the caretaker of the formula, which he calls “incredibly complex.” (Due to bans on various raw materials for toxicology, no mid-century perfume is street legal in its original form, and Guichard is charged with conserving Cellier’s vision while constantly updating it with non-allergenic materials.) Cellier packed her formula with Indian tuberose absolute, which gives it huge power and “sillage” (the olfactory trail). Like all good perfumers, she was an illusionist. To achieve an even more lifelike, more raw tuberose (this flower smells of armpit, flesh and decay due to heavy molecules called indoles; jasmine is similarly loaded with them), she used an even larger quantity of Tunisian orange blossom absolute, plus some astronomically expensive French jasmine and Italian iris root butter. Add natural violet leaf to give the sweet, heavy scent a refreshingly harsh, wet green aspect, iris for a woody depth, synthetic civet (the smell of unwashed construction worker) for power, the synthetics C18 for an unctuous, milky, soft tropical quality and methyl anthranilate for fizz. The result is a signature, a persistence on skin, and a diffusion that are - all three - astonishing. Another hat trick.

July 10th, 2008 3:55 PM Scent Notes \| Sienne l’Hiver by l’Eau d’Italie ***** By Chandler Burr
	In the winter of 2007, the tiny niche Italian house of l’Eau d’Italie launched a scent called Sienne l’Hiver. It was crafted under the careful creative direction of the house’s Owners — the Italian Marina Sersale and the Argentine Sebastián Alvarez Murena — by the French perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour, who is without a doubt one of the most interesting artists working in the field today. Duchaufour has range. He can go from fun/perky — in 2003 he did a little travel retail scent, Chris 1947, for Dior — to gold-plated luxury commercial (Amarige d’Amour for Givenchy) to the sweet-transparent English-girl-in-a-summer-dress of Honeysuckle & Jasmine for Jo Malone. But he specializes in the strange, the visceral and the dark, and on entering this territory, he leaves the rest behind. He has done several of the Comme des Garçons scents, self-consciously artsy, intellectual and, at times, beautiful: Calamus, Harissa, Kyoto and Avignon, the last of these the smell of the shadowed nave of a medieval church coated in the soot of centuries of incense. His Paestum Rose for l’Eau d’Italie is rose mixed into a bowl of dusk, a paradigm of beauty with a tincture of melancholy, ever so slightly eerie. Piment Brûlant, for l’Artisan Parfumeur, where Duchaufour has recently been appointed in-house perfumer, is a science fiction masterpiece, an olfactory heat mirage shimmering over a highway, the tingling non-smell of habañero pepper imagined as a transparent tongue of flame. Of all Duchaufour’s works, however, Sienne l’Hiver is arguably the most interesting. Its name means ‘Siena in winter,’ in reference to the Tuscan town, and in direct contradiction to the extreme abstract expressionism of Piment Brûlant, Duchaufour approaches this subject with a literalist/realist style, creating a Renaissance portrait of northern Italy in December. Artistically, the visual analog would not be Titian (Duchaufour’s work is far too masculine) nor Boticelli (whose colors are duller than Duchaufour’s star palette) but Ghirlandaio. For instance, the painter’s self-portrait done in 1488’s “Adoration of the Magi”: the sharp, rich reds, the startling poison green and the black hair that frames the strong Italian male’s face staring straight at you. Sienne l’Hiver functions with the same aesthetic. Duchaufour used mimosa absolute to give the oily green-and-black-olive aroma that opens the perfume and evolves beautifully over time, a delicious wintery brine; it will later gently transform into a subtler scent, of wood and isobutylquinoline, a molecule that gives the mineral quality of the cold stones in the Sienese streets. Dimethylsulfide gives a hint of truffle and mushroom. Pyrazines give the smell of earth and the effect of smoke drifting over barren fields. Natural castoreum, an animalic raw material, adds just the right touch of the sweaty armpits of the merchants and traces of leather from the guards’ saddles and the sweat in their horses’ coats. As a work of art, it is virtually perfect. It smells expensive, which is to say it smells as if it were made of the highest-quality materials by a perfumer who costs a lot. Like all truly intelligent scents, it is unisex. Diffusion is faultless, persistence on skin is excellent, as is structure; its materials mesh into a whole like the brushstrokes in “Adoration of the Magi.” Even the history of the city plays a role. For centuries the iron-oxide-rich earth of Siena has been burnt to form a vibrant brown pigment called burnt sienna that is used by painters. Ghirlandaio loved it. Duchaufour does as well. He gives us the smell of cold, cucumbery water for sadness. A chilly violet leaf-like angle for loneliness. And then, at the end, just in time to save us, a sensation of rich burnt earth for warmth, perhaps for love.

January 24th, 2008 11:19 AM Scent Notes \| Paestum Rose by l’Eau d’Italie ***** By Chandler Burr
	One of the problems with classical beauty is, quite simply, that we know it too well. The eye can pass over a Caravaggio painting and not really see it, finding the image too familiar. It is much easier to attract with novelty and flash, but that burns off quickly and leaves a void. The real trick is to combine the two. If an artist can create new beauty with a classic form, he has done something marvelous because his creation is doubly fueled, by the exhilarating thrill of the new and by the visceral power of the old. For classical beauty in perfume there is ultimately only one scent: rose. Yet the perfume industry (and its marketers) know that rose, like a slightly faded movie star, is a problematic sell to the public. We can smell rose yet, registering it as a known commodity, not really smell it. The niche Italian house of Eau d’Italie has taken rose and made of it a revelation. Paestum Rose was creative directed by Marina Sersale and Sebastien Alvarez Murena, Eau d’Italie’s founders, and built by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour. Duchaufour is an expert in shadows (see his Dzongka, done for l’Artisan Parfumeur). He paints olfactory charcoals and grays and deep purples with the smells of smoke and worn wood, a living Old Master of scent, and Paestum Rose is not just perfectly calibrated on a technical level. It is better than that. It is a work of art. The perfume unfolds with a scented crepuscular darkness, a twilight that is an exact balance of disappearing sunlight and incipient evening. Its rose aspect is ancient, blended with the smell of old stone — Paestum was a classical Roman city known for its roses — yet it also somehow (here’s the trick) smells utterly contemporary. There is no “green stem scent” detail here for a facile thrill, no smell of fresh flower — Duchaufour eschews such easy clichés. Nor is this a “floral” perfume in any obvious way, though it smells, in a sense, like the flower. One October in her apartment in Rome, Sersale showed me a large photograph of a Caravaggio she particularly loves, and I understood. Paestum Rose is a perfume that’s rich and filled with meaning like the intimate opalescent blacks Caravaggio painted, instantly known and strangely unfamiliar. In this perfume we smell ancient beauty made thrillingly new.

The Essence of Perfume Roja Dove Ombre Rose, Jean-Charles Brosseau, 1981
	Jean-Charles Brosseau launched his scent in 1981 it was an overnight sensation. The quiet, self-effacing, iron-willed milliner, who opened his boutique in Place des Victoires, lost his heart to a scent which was to have an impact on the direction of creation for the next quarter of a century, when he first smelt it he said, “it’s mine”, and this sentiment has been echoed by women all over the world. Ombre Rose was created by Francois Caron from two bases that had been made by Roure they came from a time when perfumery relied heavily on natural materials and had a level of complexity which is rarely fond today. The materials needed to be freshened and given life, bases are usually in dilution so they become a component part within a composition. What makes Ombre Rose so original is that the base became the scent itself, albeit that Caron worked on the bases adding a slight peachy aspect as well as a newly discovered natural isolate derived from cedarwood, but its genius comes from the work in the balsamic facets-she used an enormous quantity of coumarin with its soft and almost edible; Ombre Rose was the creation which would be developed by others into the gourmand note which dominated the 1900’s and the 2000s. Its structure is unusual as it does not have the classical top heart and base notes, and has no hesperidic facet. The floral aspect, ylang ylang, lily of the valley and rose are enveloped, the volume of coumarin, vanilla, orris, sandalwood and musk give it its distinctive character along with a note of honey. The bottle comes from an old design housed a long-lost scent called Narcisse Bleu by Mury. Brosseau told me that his daughter had bought an old bottle from a market, it was dreadful quality, but he loved the shape. Serendipitously he met the owner of a bottle manufacturer and said how he wanted “something like this”, showing her the Mury bottle, she said that she owned the mould, so he now had his bottle. They worked on it and experimented, and eventually the iconic black bottle which would house Ombre Rose was created. The name Ombre Rose is very poetic, ombre is French for shadow, rose alludes not to the flower but to the color pink- la vie en rose, or “life in the pink”, so in an esoteric way the name suggests life shadowed by happiness. Brosseau launched the scent in the USA in Bergdorf Goodman, when the buyer smelled it she said, “it’s mine”, she loved it so much she said she would buy whatever stock they had, she wanted to launch it for Mother’s Day and she took the unprecedented step of putting it in their windows-Jean Charles told me that no scent had ever been allowed this privilege before. The scent was an overnight sensation, a total sell-out. Women seemed to relate to its soft femininity, it was very refined and somehow far removed from the troubles of everyday life. One day when Brosseau was walking through an American department store he smelt a scent waft through the air that a sales assistant pronounced as Ombre Rose, as he smelt it he realized that his formula has been altered- he decided that he had to buy back the licenses, and so he, his wife, and his son Benoit spent the next ten years doing just that. The fragrance was then re-launched under that name Ombre Rose L’Original. When we launched it in the Roja Dove Haute Parfumerie every woman who saw it said the same…”My Ombre Rose”.

The Essence of Perfume Roja Dove Fracas, Piguet, 1948
	Fracas hits the uninitiated like a bomb exploding under their nose. It is the work of the legendary Germaine Cellier and as with all of her creations, is singular, original, uncompromising and ravishing beautiful. The name Fracas alludes the “disturbance”; how perfect as almost no other scent is as polarizing in the response it is able to engender. Fracas is built around a central theme of tuberose which demands the same attention as a Gaugin painting- a painter who created images of exotic women whose skin would have certainly had the same narcotic allure as the scent of this “carnal” bloom. It holds a dewy freshness which is not apparent at first and yet, is part of the top note. This harmony of bergamot and orange blossom mingles with a leafy note which is redolent of the tropical jungles miles away from the everyday reality of most. It provides a cloying harmony, a breath of freshness and great naturalness, as bounteous as nature itself. The theme was to be re-interpreted many times, inspiring Chloe and, in a lesser way, Jardins de Bagatelle from Guerlain, as well as one of the scents which epitomized a decade- Giorgio. If you compare the two it easy to see that the former is soft, dense, and luxurious, while the later is vulgar, thick and crude. The tuberose found in the heart is accompanied by jasmine, rose, and carnation which are made warm and sensual with the inclusion of a small note of peach on a cedarwood, sandalwood, benzoin and musk base. This base is treated in an unusual way-given the tuberose note- as there is an echo of the fresh, leafy naturalness in the inclusion of mosses that counter-points its ultra-sensual, luscious, creamy heart. The plain black bottle is a perfect foil; its sober lines are far removed from the reality of the precious liquid it contains. It alludes to a time which had already passed, as does the scent, whose clear-faceted bottle stopper is suggestive of the brightness of the leafy notes: the stoke of genius Cellier left behind as her most enduring legacy.

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Bandit (Robert Piguet) ***** bitter chypre
	I’ll start with a note of caution: I’ve owned several bottles of the original Bandit over the years, and this is not it. But read on. Reproducing modern versions of Germaine Cellier’s masterpiece is both easy and hard: easy, because her perfumes had such bold, distinctive structures that even a pixilated version of Bandit, such as the last, dreadfully cheapened and traduced “original” version, was still recognizably the old scoundrel; hard, because Cellier was found of using bases in her compositions, to the horror of other perfumers. Bases are mini-perfumes, prepackaged compositions that dispense you from reinventing the wheel every time you need a complex but recognizable note in your fragrance: peach, leather, amber, etc. Some, like Ambre 83, Persicol and Animalis, are so rich and so good that you wonder why nobody just bottled them and sold them. The problem was Cellier’s use of bases in that half of them have disappeared, so that even the whole formula were to fall into your hands and you trekked to the address of the maker of Dianthiline 12 in Grasse, you’d likely find a time-share development instead of a little fragrance factory. Modern reconstructions of Cellier’s perfumes are above all a work of translation of the original formula into things you can actually identify and buy today. In my opinion, this can be positive: these perfumes always carried a certain amount of excess baggage to compensate for the starkness of the basic accord. If can be done elegantly, a cleanup is in itself no bad thing. One just has to get used to the idea that, as with a vintage aircraft, what you see is a machine in which perhaps only the serial number plate subsist from the original, and every spar and rivet has been made from scratch. This version of the original 1947 original is a bit like a reconstructed Bell X-1 supersonic aircraft: sleek, beautifully done, and a mite too clean, as if ready for a movie shoot. But the magic is all there: bitter, dark yet fresh, beguiling without any softness, and still several unlit streets ahead of every other leather chypre around. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Fougere Bengale (Parfum d’Empire) **** spicy lavender
	If this is a fougere, my local Indian restaurant is a florist. This is an intense, saturation reinterpretation of the lavender-curry (helichrysum) accord of Eau Noire, delicious from a distance and a little loud up close, but overall very pleasant. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Fracas (Robert Piguet) ***** butter tuberose
	A friend once explained to me how Ferrari achieves that gorgeous red: first paint the car silver, then six coats of red, then a coat of transparent pink varnish. Germaine Cellier would have approved. Her masterpiece Fracas, after going though a threadbare patch in the eighties, was revived by a US outfit and spruced up to a quality approximating the original as far as possible, with the usual Cellier caveats of disappeared bases (see Bandit). To my nose, what makes Fracas great is a wonderful buttery note up top, which I attribute to chamomile, and a nice bread-like iris touch in the drydown. Pink and silver, with tuberose red in between. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Jasmin et Cigarette (Etat Libre d’Orange) **** floral ashtray
	Delightfully does what is says, with only one small quibble: had Rene Magritte smelled this fragrance, he would no doubt exclaimed: “Ceci est un pipe!” The tobacco note in this fragrance reminds me not of a cigarette, but of the old Monsieur Rochas, which was designed to smell like a cold pipe. How times have changed. Smoking is now a sin, and some erotic magazines specialize in pictures of smoking women, making me think I should have stocked up years ago. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Je Suis un Homme (Etat Libre d’Orange) **** woody citrus
	An excellent woody masculine in the general direction of Guerlain’s Derby, but drier and with more citrus up top. Solid, nicely crafted and lush. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Maharanih (Parfums de Nicolai) **** powdery orange
	This one had been described to me as an amber oriental, and being familiar with the Maharajah parfum d’ambiance I expected the female of the species to be heavy and heavy. Wrong again: Maharanih reminds me of the practical joke once played on a famous conductor by his orchestra. They agreed among themselves to replace a climatic tutti by complete silence. When the moment came, the conductor expected a tremendous blast, got nothing, and fell forward off the platform. The initial citrus of the Maharanih swirls quietly past you almost before you’ve had time to think. From experience, you expect a boulder-like amber accord to come rolling down next, but nothing happens At which point you fell into this extraordinary, delicate, luminous orange-rose-and-incense composition, an extended-range Vol de Nuit that managed to fly long enough to see sunrise. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez New York (Parfums de Nicolai) ***** orange amber
	If Guerlain had any sense, they would buy Parfums de Nicolai, add PdN’s range to theirs, trash fifteen or so of their own laggard fragrances, a couple of de Nicolai’s, and install owner-creator Patricia de Nicolai in Orphin as in-house perfumer. She is, after all, a granddaughter of Pierre Guerlain and genetic analysis might usefully reveal the genes associated with her perfumery talent. As a control where the genes are known to be absent, uses the DNA of whoever did Creed’s Love in White. Smelling New York as I write this, eighteen years after its release, is like meeting an old high school teacher who had a decisive influence on my life: I may have moved on, but everything it taught me is still there, still precious and wonderful to revisit. New York’s exquisite balance between resinous orange, powdery vanilla and salubrious woods shimmers from moment to moment, always comfortable but never slacks, always present but never loud. It is one of the greatest masculines ever, and probably the one I would save if the house burned down. Reader, I wore it for a decade. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Ombre Rose (L’Original)(Jean-Charles Brosseau) **** Powdery rose
	JCB’s Ombre Rose was a deservedly huge success when it cane out in 1981. Composed by the great Francoise Caron and released at the same time as her forgotten masterpiece Choc (Cardin), Ombre Rose was way ahead of it’s time, a powdery fruity-woody rose that has been imitated a hundred times since, often by perfumers unaware of what their model is. I’m not crazy about this type of fragrance, and Brosseau is a stack-em-high-and-sell-em-cheap sort of firm, but they were unquestionably the first to set foot on this particular planet inhabited by flesh-eating Barbies. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Rose d’Amour (Parfums de Rosine) **** rose chypre
	This cold, dense composition, market most in the top by the barn-yard smell of narcissus, seems at first reminiscent of the atmosphere of rooms that have gone unventilated too long. After a time the windows open, and it settles into a handsome, easy green soapy style related to Rive Gauche. It could make a fine masculine. TS

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Le Temps d’un Fette (Parfums de Nicolai) ***** green narcissus
	Guy Kawasaski once said that he believed in God because he could see no other reason for the continued existence of Apple Computer, Inc. Now that Apple is out of the woods, I shall redirect my prayers towards Parfums de Nicolai. Patricia de Nicolai , owner and perfumer, is one of the unsung greats of the fragrance world, and her superb creations survive in spite of inept marketing, absurd names, and the incapacity of the outfit to settle on a single shade of blue for their packaging or to hire a designer that will finally put their dowdy image out of its misery. This is their latest feminine, and it signals a departure from their ill-advised attempts to make more commercial fragrances. Les Temps d’un Fette is irresistibly lovely. Furthermore, it fills a gap in my heart I didn’t know existed. I have always been impressed by the structure of Lancome’s Poeme but dismayed by its cheap, angular execution. Conversely, I have always loved Guerlain’s Chamade but deplored a slight lack of bone structure, particularly in the latest version. Les Temps d’un Fette maries the two and achieves something close to perfection, rich, radiant, solid, with the unique complexity of expensive narcissus absolute braced by olfactory bookends of green-floral notes and woods. Very classical and truly wonderful. LT

Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez Vraie Blonde (Etat Libre d’Orange) **** milky floral
	It is remarkable to see an apparently gimmicky firm like ELdO come up time and again with perfumes of genuine substance, complexity and interest. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, two is good fortune, but three looks like intelligence. This perfumer, young Antoine Maisondieu, is clearly a talent to watch. His Vraie Blonde (Real Blonde) is deeply strange, a deliberately odd structure with a bruised fruit smell reminiscent of the decade of Champagne (now called Yvresse), but taken even further with an almost buttermilk note in the dry down. If this is the future, in like it very much. LT