making history III: the usable pasts of creed and farina

After a long hiatus we now conclude our look at history and perfume with two extremely juxtaposed approaches of perfume houses to their past – call it source-based history versus history as myth. According to Family Business Magazine the Perfume Houses Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichsplatz and Creed are among the oldest family-owned businesses, tracing their beginnings to 1709 and 1760, respectively. Not surprisingly, their age and history plays a key part in both company’s image and marketing. Roughly 30,000 visitors annually tour the old Farina premises in the heart of Cologne known as the birthplace of Eau de Cologne, which house a store, museum and the current managing director Johann Maria Farina’s offices. The company stresses its 300-year dedication to quality, a glorious past as the leading perfume manufacturer for a 200-year period, and a wealth of illustrious clients. Similarly, Creed’s reputation is built around its role as purveyor to the rich and the beautiful, from the royal courts of yesterday to today’s Hollywood elite, as well as references to old artisanal traditions passed down from generation to generation. Both these firms do indeed have a genuine history, as opposed to the many brands who borrow past names but are really newly formed ventures. And yet, the way they deal with their histories could not be more distinct. Succinctly put, one could say that Farina Gegenüber has almost obsessively displayed its history to the public from the necessity of defending its position and reputation against innumerable plagiarizers and forgeries, boasting a series of 2000 court cases which has not yet ceased. Creed, on the other hand, has always felt a need to both obscure and rewrite its history from the desire of wishing to appear as a 250-year old fragrance house, rather than as a respected tailor’s who happened to dabble in fragrance and only became a perfume house proper in the late 1960s or beyond (there is little evidence even for this late period). The purpose here is not to judge these approaches, but to illustrate how two comparatively small perfume houses with no major PR budget use and have used history under differing circumstances to position themselves in a competitive market up into the present, where their businesses create status illusions and confirmations and emotional fantasies for high end consumers in the niche market. Such fantasies, as one should never forget, are the basic product perfume houses sell, for which their fragrances are simply carrier substances, like alcohol for essential oils.

Creed: A Royal Fantasy

The Creed entry in Family Business Magazine reads:

“In 1760 King George III appointed James Creed to make fragrances. In 1854 the company moved its operations from London to Paris. Both Prince Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, commissioned the company to make scents for them. Today, owner Oliver Creed produces 238 fragrances.“

The problem is that such testimonials tend to be unsubstantiated and, more importantly, that there is no available evidence for the historical relevance, or even the existence, of Creed perfumes prior to the late 20^th century. The oldest flacon I have ever seen an image of seems to hark from the late 1960s or early 1970s and bears the name of Olivier Creed. Major visibility seems to have arrived in the 1980s with Green Irish Tweed.

No documents, novels, advertisements, letters of the 19^th or 20^th century mention Creed perfumes, while the family frequently appears in the context of tailoring. Fashion dictionaries and museums feature works by Creeds, but every perfume history I have read is silent. One of the rare statements from within the family is a ghost-written autobiography by one of its “black sheep” Charles Creed (1909-1966), the uncle of Olivier Creed. Primarily an account of his own exploits at tailoring and womanizing it does make references to the family history and its meteoric rise to fame after 1850, when Henry Creed opened a Paris office and collected Royal Warrants from the French Court and Queen Victoria for clothes and riding habits. While it may be that Creed furnished fragrances as well, as did Guerlain, Farina and other renowned names of the day in perfumery, there is simply no available evidence. The internet spews out frequently conflicting dates and wearers of older Creed perfumes, which in their present form cannot possibly have existed prior to the advent of modern natural-cum-synthetic based perfumery in the 1880s. The beautiful Vintage Tabarôme was thus supposedly made in 1876 for George IV (b. *1762, c.1820, d.1830), Green Irish Tweed for Cary Grant (1904-1986) – it is now undisputed that Pierre Bourdon collaborated on GIT, perhaps in the mid-1980s, and would rework some of its key ideas in Davidoff’s Cool Water. GIT just may have been Archie’s deathbed wish, but the facts do not actually compute.

Olivier Creed, then, has chosen to rewrite the complicated history of a fashion house’s 19^th century rise and post-WWII fall into a brand story for his own fragrance enterprise and it has been an unconditionally successful strategy that enables his company to charge a premium for its products in retail contexts. The pomp and circumstance surrounding Creed, from the imitation Prince of Wales ostrich plumes suggesting a Royal Warrant that does not exist, to the monotonous incantation of stock phrases and name dropping by Creed representatives and in PR pieces is also cause for derision, e.g. by Luca Turin, but admittedly, it is a spiel that most everyone in the business plays in one way or another.

Farina Gegenüber: History as a Weapon

Like Creed, Farina Gegenüber is a firm with a rich heritage, a fact that nearly broke its neck when it failed to adapt to changing consumer patterns after WWII. After a long, slow decline, the family bought back all stock in the company from outside investors and began reconstituting the brand as an exclusive niche firm, recreating its historical flacon designs, stressing its unique selling point as the original Eau de Cologne, and restricting sales to selected outlets who may not sell the brand’s discount nemesis, 4711. As with Creed, this has proven a successful strategy that invests the product with a high prestige value. But contrary to Creed, the history of the Farina fragrance is unusually well documented, as it had become the subject of conflicting claims by competing Eau de Cologne firms inventing their own foundational narratives and frequently stealing the Farina brand name ever since the late 18^th century. The Farina archive is one of the most complete company archives in the world, it has been used for a number of academic studies in economic history and it documents the history of Farina cologne extensively – Royal warrants, orders by the celebrities of the day (we are talking Goethe, not some American Idol runner-up), historical advertising. While this does not preclude different interpretations of Eau de Cologne history, a basic factual record from which to proceed is extant and available and has formed the basis for evidence in many of the court cases fought by Farina (and they did win them all). Does this mean that Farina Eau de Cologne is a more authentic or better perfume than, say, Creed’s Bois de Cedrat (a light citrus cologne supposedly formulated in 1875)? No. The Farina you buy today is also a reformulated product containing synthetics. It is meant to preserve and convey the spirit of the original while catering to the wishes of contemporary consumers, e.g. in terms of longevity. However, while Creed long emphasized its reliance on ancient infusion methods and avoided the mention of synthetics (there have been modest concessions in more recent PR blurbs, as would seem necessary considering the obvious high content of synthetics in most Creed releases since the mid-80s) Johann Maria Farina, who is a trained pharmacist and perfumer, openly embraces the ethos of modern (i.e. post 1880s) perfumery and its use of naturals with semi- and fully synthetic materials.

Creed and Farina have chosen very different paths to create “usable pasts” for their brand, which are themselves in many ways determined by the nature of those histories. They offer fascinating insights for the historian of smells into the depths and shoals of the past of perfumes as well as lessons on the fictions involved in fragrance branding for the student of perfume culture today. But for the simple lover of perfume truth lies only within the flacon and history - is bunk.

read making history II: the carthusian candidate
read making history, faking history

emperor's clothes

I have spent a delightful week in London, my favorite city, and despite the challenges and physical exhaustion that come with a 2.5 year old on an urban vacation, everybody had a good time. Daughter at Coram's Fields and the zoo , mom at the Tate and dad in Jermyn Street .
London is a great place for food and fragrance and like anywhere else in the world, there are renowned locations or products considered the epitome of quality and refinement. Sometimes these institutions are quite old and they have stuck to their principles and remain beacons of a past time. Others are merely facades behind which principles have been corrupted - or haven't kept up with new quality standards. This is all way too abstract, so let's make it practical: Fortnum&Mason is an inevitable address in every London tourist guide and I am not sure whether any native has been seen, on the ground floor at least, as a customer in the last twenty years - it's all full of Germans, Americans and Japanese eagerly buying tea, orange marmalade and other typically British fare at Francis Draconian prices. But just how good are these gold-plated foods? Well, to give you one example, F&M shortbread is not even pure butter, it contains cheap vegetable oils. Good old M&S , on the other hand, does pure butter shortbread (at a fraction of the price). They even have an organic version now and it's pretty tasty, if not quite Walker's.
The Fortnum approach is reminiscent of certain ultra-niche lines, which sell fragrant banalities in a fancy crystal bottle for astronomical prices to people who want to purchase prestige rather than smell good. Clive Christian is the F&M of English perfume - which one could care less about, if he hadn't bought and gutted the very fine Crown Perfumery for the purpose of using their bottle designs, while ending production of their truly well-made classic fragrances.
How refreshing, on the other hand, is the sobriety of Taylor of Old Bond Street, a classical men's grooming establishment that offers a range of simple and effective aftershaves and colognes with no other purpose but to equip the gentleman with the low key smell of the same - at an unpretentious 15 or17 quid a pop. I chose a bottle of Shaving Shop cologne as my souvenir - a fragrance which will remind every man of his father: aromatic citrus, with notable grapefruit and rosemary notes, and a mossy musky wood base - simple and yet strangely alluring, in other words, perfectly masculine.
Let me conclude by saying that we had some wonderful fish dinners at an unpretentious family run place, the North Sea Fish Restaurant in Leigh St., while the definite bummer of the trip was a disastrously bad & expensive meal at renowned eating institution St. John - I should have known that when Brits advertise "simple pared-down" cooking you don't get some kind of ingenious nouvelle cuisine a l'Anglaise, but ineptly boiled (i.e. half-raw) unseasoned cabbage.

Image: Our daughter's giraffe and a typical London view.

what it takes to make a perfume

I recently interviewed Johann Maria Farina, the managing director of the world's oldest fragrance house, Farina Gegenüber [I shall be mentioning this frequently :-) ]. The original Johann Maria (1685-1766) was the inventor of Eau de Cologne. His descendant pointed out to me that an essential precondition for Farina to be able to create his citrus-based fragrance was the cultivation of bergamot, which had begun only about twenty years earlier. This story prefigures what happened about 160 years later, when the advances made in organic chemistry had the side effect of initiating modern perfumery which required the newly available semi- or full synthetics to build complex, lasting, innovative and affordable fragrances. That, of course, is just one of several technical aspects (among others was the necessity to advance distillation to a point where 70% and higher alcohols could be created to serve as a solution for herb or essential oils). These are necessary but not sufficient preconditions to explain the rise of Eau de Cologne or modern perfumery. We know that the ancient Greeks had the theoretical and practical know-how to launch an industrial revolution - physics, hydraulics, steam power etc. But there are numerous socio-cultural and economic reasons it did not happen - e.g. the availability of slave labor and the low regard in which manual labor, including applied sciences, was held. Eau de Cologne became a success because it corresponded to Enlightenment concepts of hygiene, health, civility and deportment - heavy musks were associated with artifice, depravity, and addiction, while the light citrus floral represented naturalness, vitality and hygiene. Likewise, industrial perfumery required a new white collar middle class as the backbone of a consumer society which would redefine bodies, female in particular, as spaces of commodified representation through dieting, fashion, and, of course, perfume.
Perfume, thus, is one little node within the vast and unfathomable network of causes and effects that is human history and agency and which binds us all together in ways we can rarely truly explain, much less anticipate. Next time you spritz your favorite, take a deep sniff of history and feel your connection with the cosmos.

laudatio temporis actae

As I have been sniffing the reformulations of British house Czech & Speake's Rose, Dark Rose and Frankincense & Myrrh against the "vintage" versions I could not help wondering to what extent our judgment of new and old is determined by the eternal conservative-progressive dichotomy in human nature, individuals and generations. It seems like the first Cro-Magnons must have already complained about "that new fangled cave art" while the younger generation was probably bitching about "grandpa style bear skins." Burkean clinging to established tradition versus Jacobin belief that change means improvement, back-to-nature hippies against sci-fi utopians, the celebration of perfume technology's advances (so many new molecules a year, CO2 extraction) versus the hyperinflation of mundane fragrance clones and the dominance of profit-obsessed corporations destroying the art of perfumery.
Perfume reformulations, of course, are a special case. Most people don't mind the improvement of a product, like a car or a phone - though there is a healthy suspicion that it may involve some cheapening. Companies like manufactum are built on the premise that the product improvements of the last decades have had devastating effects on quality and are really just cost-efficient, profit-increasing planned obsolesence schemes or at best results of a misguided technological Whiggism. But when it comes to perfumes as aesthetic artisanry or even art, reformulation would seem to amount to desecration. Who would dare reformulate the Mona Lisa (except Duchamp) or paint over the Sistine Chapel? True, there are cases in which reformulations, often the result of a change in content regulations, seem to have been ultimately successful, as in the case of Mitsouko. But in the vast majority of cases, reformulations seem to be careless affairs determined by profit or market optimization and after a string of such experiences it is hard not to fall into a gloomy Spenglerian mood of 'decline and fall' (Turin and Sanchez' Perfume: The Guide is littered with such stories)

So how about Czech&Speake? This company, though started in 1979 rather than 1878, places itself in an English tradition of craft and quality with its massive bathroom fittings, as well as its aromatics line. They are on top of the British fragrance game and C&S No. 88, their flagship fragrance, is one of the finest creations ever in that tradition, rivaling its inspiration, monikerwise, Floris No. 89, for the title of quintessential English scent.

There are some issues about who exactly created these fragrances, but British nose John Stephen of Cotswold Perfumery played a major role. Ironically the fragrances were made by an Italian firm, Forester Milano for a number of years until production was moved (once again?) to England a few years ago. It was at this point that the fragrances changed. Foresters floral bases, for one, have a distinctive style and high quality, which one can also smell in Washington Tremlett's Black Tie . It gave No. 88 a deep, complex liquorous floral heart that made it stunningly neo-gothic or pre-raffaelite. While the new 88 is still an excellent perfume, that dimension has disappeared from the scent, which I perceive as a great loss. This made me anticipate the other reformulations with Spenglerian, or perhaps more fittingly Gibbonesque, trepidations of Decline and Fall...

And yes, while Rome, or London, still stand, change has not been for the better (sorry, Barack).
The perfumes have become lighter, more accomodating, the seem to have lost something of their eccentric personality, even if we are not dealing with the kind of lobotomy that Luca Turin accuses the house of Caron of. Thus Frankincense & Myrrh, one of the finest (and one of the few Iso-E-super free) incense fragrances has turned into a rather demure citrus-(cedar)wood standard with the incense moving into the ranks. Dark Rose, C&S' rose & oud challenge to Montale (and a very succesful one) suffers, like No. 88, from a loss of depth in the rose note, as well as turning to a lighter oud, making this quite similar to the daintier Montales such as Damascus. The end result may be just a little to full of English restraint. The same applies, more gravely so, to Rose, the most purely floral of the rose trio probably preferred by women more than by men. The old Rose was as treacherously innocuous as a Victorian novel. All sweetness and gentility, damast and civility - but between the lines there lurked and abrasive edginess (sharp citrus), immoral depth (superior rose oils), razor thorns. In this respect an utterly brilliant creation.

The new rose requires a direct comparison with the painfully mundane Amouage Lyric Men (no offense to fans) to appear at all interesting. It's the surface without those extra dimensions that made the original more than another decent smelling rose fragrance. Is it bad? No, perhaps not even mediocre. Just nothing I truly need with rose fragrances such as Rose Poivrée, Fleurs de Bulgarie, Hammam Bouquet, Black Tie etc. and C&S's own Dark Rose and 88 available.

Decline and Fall? No, but muddling along.

Illustration: Norman Rockwell, Abstract and Concrete (1962)

...of Orient Are

“Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

- Edward Said

One needn’t share Edward Said’s overstated view of Orientalism, as developed in his eponymous classic study, to acknowledge that there frequently has been a strong European (and by extension American) tendency to see the ”East” – whether “near” “middle” or “far” in starkly binary terms. The Christian, prim, rational, enlightened, democratic, egalitarian, progressive, technological West has often defined this significant other in terms of heathenism, superstition, despotism, decadence, backwardness and inscrutability. Such stereotypes were used to stabilize one’s own fragile self-image and to assert a supposed general superiority which, in the military realm, became a reality beginning in the late 18^th century, when the conquest of India commenced in earnest, while the power of the Osmanic empire slowly began to wane. In cultural terms, the mystical East – always also the geographical location of Paradise and Jerusalem for Christians and thus far from being a negative - has served from the earliest times as an imaginary space on which to project fantasies of immeasurable wealth, the luxuries of what really was a superior civilization – silk, spices, precious essential oils and balms - and unlimited sexual indulgences of dominant men and submissive women sequestered in harems - perhaps the locus classicus of the orientalist imagination. The harem as we know it from the semipornographic kitsch of 19^th century Western novels and painting is simply the return of the Victorian repressed. Smell Penhaligon’s Hammam Bouquet even in its declawed modern form and you know it signified the other oriental H-word to contemporaries with its dirty floral prowess and musky sexuality.

Needless to say that the “oriental” is a defining category in European perfumery and fragrance history, from the spices and balms brought to the infant Jesus and craved by the medieval nobility, to Guerlain’s exotistic Shalimar or the recent Idole de Lubin. But what do Westerners expect of actual “oriental”, i.e. Arabian or Indian perfumes? When I placed my order for 5 perfume oils at a Berlin purveyor of everything from Islamic fashion to religious artefacts, incense and fragrance, could I possibly escape the cliché of being initiated into some sort of “secret of the orient,” of luxurious fantasies of Attar, oud and jasmine-rose excesses, of “authentic” Shalimar decadence? And wasn’t there, in the back of my head, the inevitable imperially-tinged hope that I could score the rarest of essences from a "naïve peddler" at a fraction of the price that firms such as Montale or Amouage charge for their Eastern delights? Well, I had had a few previous brushes with Arabian perfume products which brought home very clearly the messages of a globalized economy: good oud (agarwood) or sandalwood will cost a fortune anywhere, and you will always get cheap synthetics in a $4 perfume oil. No less a perfume scion than Jean Paul Guerlain recalls, in his My Journeys in the World of Perfume, a laborious trip to highly recommended Indian sandalwood producers in the town of Kannauj, as he was seeking a source of good raw material for his new oriental Samsara. What he discovered were “neatly-lined up drums bearing the labels of companies well-known in the perfume industry.”

So my expectations were tempered and I deliberately avoided going for the popular recreations of Western designer scents or anything that sounded like just another Calone-aquatic. Besides four typical blends at roughly 5 Euros for 3ml I decided to buy the shop’s top offering, an undefined Attar for 7.50 Euros per ml – still light-years from the outrageous cost of high quality ouds, which can sell at hundreds of dollars for one millilitre. And you thought investing in gold was clever. We’ll leave those treasures to the Sultan of Oman and see what the postman, rather than three kings, brought your financially strained perfume blogger. A caveat. I have smelled lenty of Western-sytle perfumes but only a few real ouds and attars, so my frame of reference is highly Eurocentric. But inspired by the Enlightenment, I do entertain the vague hope that quality can be universally recognized.

Bakhoor al Madni: Patchouli, indian Agarwood (Oud), Jasmine, Sandalwood, Saffron, Rose.

Bakhoor is actually the term for woodchips soaked in fragrant oils for burning as a form of incense. The ingredients sounded perfectly oriental. Unfortunately it smelled exactly like good ole American 100% artificially flavoured grape soda – a strong childhood memory of mine. The floral oils must either be cheap synthetics or really inferior naturals. The supposed woods and spices didn’t even get a chance here. Ghastly.

Mukhallat (=Blend) El Emirates by Al Haramain (a low to mid-price producer). No notes given. Rose and Oud, a Montale on the cheap. The rose is rather candied-sweet and the oud is probably synthetic – it is extremely mild and nearly more woody than typically pungent. It proceeds to move into a slightly soapy direction. Not bad at all considering the price – Montale’s rose is often similarly sweet, e.g. in Black & Royal Oud, but there is not enough oud power here to check that. To make a fairer comparison price-wise, this is way better than the awful Opium pour homme with its wretchedly synthetic vanilla-bomb orientalness worthy of Disneyland.

Misk Hindi: Patchouli, Castoreum, Rose, Indian Agarwood (Oud). This one spontaneously reminded me of Creed’s Royal English Leather, as well as of the typical smell in Indian convenience stores that sell spices, cosmetics, soaps and incense. Sweet leathery notes of castoreum, patchouli, balanced florals, no explicit oudh note. In direct comparison, REL is brighter, drier in the top, more leathery, and generally fuller, while there’s more herbal patchouli and muskiness to Hindi. Hippie associqations are inevitable, but I liked this a lot and it’s the winner among this selection.

Mukhallat al Oud by Al Haramain: Indian Oud, Musk: a boring synthetic oud on a synthetic skin-scent musk base. Next, please.

Attar: no details on anything. The only one with a distinct oud note – pungent freshly chopped wood in a saw-mill, dry leather notes like in a cramped shoestore, drying lacquer paint on a boat in drydock with faint whiffs of smoky-petroleum lubricant. Very solvent/chemical like. No obvious sweetness of florals, just some resinous balsamic note tucked way at the bottom somewhere. This may be natural or not, it certainly reminds me more of the natural ouds I have tried – which often smell so decidedly unnatural to a Western nose. Interesting rather than beautiful and requires more exploration. An interesting conclusion to a pleasant trip into a different and yet not-so-different perfume world that yielded at least two keepers.

So much for the Christmas edition of state of the [car]nation. Happy holidays to everyone out there and may good smells be yours in 2009.

Illustration:Fabio Fabbi, Harem Dancers (1885)

making history, faking history II: the carthusian candidate

A cynic might say that the contemporary art of perfumery consists of putting 50 cents worth of materials into an expensive looking bottle which is then cleverly wrapped into the folds of a prestige brand that will allow charging $80 or $150 or $250 for the product (the price point may be part of the prestige sell). For companies not backed up by a strong designer brand – be it Calvin Klein or Boss in the mass market, or the more upscale Prada and nichey Etro, a flowery history can form the basis of high prestige. Age and continuity in volatile markets have always been considered markers of quality and dependability, and they offer the marketing opportunity of romantic narratives about glamorous dandies, passionate princesses, and secret forgotten prescriptions of eternal youth and beauty.

Monk myths in particular have enjoyed great popularity throughout the history of perfume marketing and they carry a kernel of truth, since monasteries were indeed the keepers of medieval societies’ botanical wisdom and antiquity’s heritage. These were harnessed towards the concoction of medicinal products out of which European perfume culture emerged – Eau de Cologne began its success story as a tonic to be imbibed or inhaled. In fact, the legend of what is Europe’s oldest documented perfume – Eau d’Hongrie or Hungary Water recounts that a hermit monk presented it to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary (a composite character uniting different historical figures) with the assurance that it would preserve her perfect beauty forever – which would help explain why the Polish King proposed to her when she was seventy-two.

Variations of this story abound and they frequently feature Carthusians, the herbal cracks among monks who are perhaps best known for their green Chartreuse liqueur. The legend promulgated by the House of Carthusia (as legend) recounts a gift of flowers by the Carthusian monks on Capri to a visiting Queen, which accidentally macerated, turning the flower water into a wonderful fragrance (unlikely when I consider the smell of week-old water in a vase of wilted tulips). The supposedly real history is that the monks’ old recipes were rediscovered in 1948 and were then reissued by a small laboratory in Torino and that the industrial synthetic-natural formulas now marketed under the brand name are made using “the same methods as the Carthusian monks.” I Profumi di Firenze has a remarkably similar secular version of this story in which a pharmacist rediscovered the ancient perfume prescriptions of Catherine of Medici, who is said to have brought culinary and perfume culture from Florence to the French court. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, known to be ahead of his time, invented the synthetic perfume molecules prominent in this house’s fragrances before they were rediscovered by modern chemistry? Now that would make history and perfumery journal headlines!

The many monks populating perfume mythology raise the question of whether the clergy should be incensed (no pun intended) by these ecclesiastical borrowings for crude commercial purposes? Well, when it comes to matters of business, the spiritual men of the cloth and the monk’s cowl have always taken a rather pragmatic approach themselves. Witness the monks of Caldey island, whose lavender water was highly praised by Luca Turin. If you read the ad copy of retailers such as manufactum, you get the impression that local lavender is lovingly distilled by Brother Lewellyn himself according to some old book of herbal prescriptions. But according to Turin, the formula was actually developed by a professional Belgian perfumer (hopefully Catholic, at least), Hugo Collumbien, who used the finest French lavender from the Vaucluse and provided it with longevity by fixating it with a (nowadays) synthetic musk called Exaltolid. Next time your at the Caldey monastery listen closely whether its really "Exulte Deo" the friars are singing.

But back to the Carthusians and the making of perfume history: one of the best known and for a long time most successful perfume products was 4711. And guess what? Company founder Wilhelm Mülhens acquired the secret recipe for his Eau De Cologne from a Carthusian monk who had fled the chaos of the French Revolution in Grenoble and was taken in by the Mülhens family of Cologne. A different version tells of the valuable scroll having been the monk’s gift on the occasion of Wilhelm Mülhens’ marriage, a scene imagined in the post-WWII painting you can see on the upper left. As it happens, the monk’s name was Farina- the Italian surname borne by the established and reputable cologne-producing families in the city. As Eau de Cologne became big business, it became common practice for Germans to buy the Farina name off Italians in order to establish their own Farina cologne operation. Alas, the historical record shows that Mülhens, listed in the Cologne registry as a “speculator,” bought the name off one Carl Franz Maria Farina in Bonn, Germany, who had been producing Eau de Cologne under the privilege of Franz, Archduke of Austria and Elector of Cologne. Thus 4711 began its history as “Franz Maria Farina” on not-quite-so-Carthusian ground but as a "phony Farina" - in fact he resold the name thirty times to other entrepeneurs. Only when the strenuous efforts of the original Farinas to protect their name resulted in the first pan-German trademark law in 1874 was Mülhens forced to drop the Farina name and adopted the ingenuously recognizable 4711 moniker, leaving the competition behind in the dust as the number became nearly synonymous with German Eau de Cologne in the 20th century and particularly after WWII.

This story leads us to the third part of this little series, in which we will compare the histories and mythologies of the two oldest operating family-owned perfume companies: Farina Gegenüber, makers of the original Eau de Cologne (1709) and Creed (1763), a well-known niche perfume house. We’ll see how Farina’s obsession with presenting facts and Creed’s obsession with avoiding them is deeply rooted in both houses' actual histories and the need to handle them in a way that ensured their economic survival.

making history, faking history

The Nuremberg Christkindlesmarket, or Christmas Fair, is world-renowned. Harking back all the way to the 16/17^th century, when Protestants replaced the gift-bearing Catholic Saint Nicolas of December 6 with a newfangled Lutheran “Christkind” (reverting into the red-suited male Kris Kringle = Santa Claus = Saint Nicolas in the US) which brought presents on Christmas Eve (respectively Day), it is the very embodiment of old-fashioned German/European festive culture and attracts millions of tourists every year.

Not too many people know that central features of the market, particularly the grand opening ceremony featuring the angelic, blond-wigged child and two tinselled angels, which is even featured on the evening news, were invented by the Nazis in 1933. They considered the proper re-orchestration of the festival and its relocation to the city center, the former site of the Jewish Ghetto, a proper step in Re-Germanizing the town which would become the site of the more pagan spectacle of the “Reichsparteitage.” The Nazi mayor of Nuremberg also brought the town’s historical architecture into line, falsely Gothicizing Romanesque buildings to give them what was considered the proper Teutonic aura.

This little Christmas story is just a minor example of the way in which history is reconstructed, or often purely invented, for the purpose of serving some contemporary agenda. It is one of the oldest games in the book, because history has always provided legitimacy and is a key source of identity for our species, blessed and cursed with the gift of memory. In the world of perfume, history rarely plays a sinister role, but a considerable number of houses has chosen to build their brand image on impressive historical pedigrees which signify tradition, dignity, quality and an opportunity for consumers to connect with a luxurious past of nobility and royalty and the pomp and circumstance of the glorious old European courts. Among these purportedly venerable names we find Creed (1760) and Rancé (1795), Carthusia (1380) and Santa Maria Novella (15??), Farina Gegenüber (1709) and 4711 (1792) and numerous others. Needless to say that their histories, on closer inspection, not always turn out quite what they seem to be…

To be continued…

Illustration: Washington having bought Creed in Delaware.