A Natural Gourmand for Gourmets: Chocolat Irisé by Annette Neuffer

How you perceive, classify and evaluate scents fundamentally depends your broader socio-cultural and personal biographical scent socialization. There is no doubt my high sensitivity towards monomolecular synthetic aromachemicals is owed to the abscence of most functional perfumery in our household: for decades we have only used unfragranced detergents, cleaners etc. and only naturally fragranced cosmetics and soaps. As a result I perceive much of the world and people around me as regular synth-bombs reeking of dihydromyrcenol, calone, ambroxan, ethylvanillin etc., all of which they seem hardly even to register. At such moments I sympathize with perfume prohibition in the workplace, though that will not eliminate the fascinating phenomenon of long-unwashed clothes still exuding „april-fresh“ wafts of fabric softener scent. Many of my fellow citizens, children and adults alike, seem completely desensitized when it comes to this olfactory overkill, while at the same time finding the natural smell of a body to be completely inacceptable and "unhygienic." I ask myself sometimes: what should be the consequence of the fact that all humans are principally entirely and intuitively capable of differentiating between monomolecular and complex natural scents, between phenethyl alcohol and rose oil? Considering, as a legendary Slow Food experiment showed, that children not exposed to unprocessed foods tended to prefer the synthetic aroma of strawberry yoghurt to the challenging complexity of a real strawberry, a sign of gustatory and olfactory impoverishment, of a brutal sensory limitation to engaging the complexity and sensory reality of the world. This is not so much an immediate health issue, but one of aesthetics and of aisthesis (humans as sensorily perceiving bodies) ; it raises fundamental questions about the nature of our being-in-the-world. Perhaps it is time to consider the question of naturals and synthetics (a difficult differentiation, but if you prefer: complex naturally sourced scents and monomolecules) in perfumery from this vantage point, rather than the misleading debate about allergies (which are just as likely to be caused by natural oils with hundreds of secondary and tertiary components than by synthetics).

Soooo....As Chocolat Irisé has once more proven to me, the fact that I detest with a passion the great majority of gourmand perfumes has nothing at all to do with the genre as such, but with its consistent cultivation of artificiality grounded in massive monomolecular overdosing. A good crème brulée can only be made with real vanilla pods, not vanillin flavouring, and a good gourmand requires a high percentage of natural oils with a complex olfactory spectrum. Sure, Jacques Guerlain's Shalimar contained vanillin, but it also brimmed with tonka, iris, 30% (!) bergamot, as well as jasmine, rose, birch tar, patchouli, sandalwood and more and more and more. The beauty of unobtrusive complexity!

And so we come to Annette Neuffers take on the oriental gourmand, Shalimar naturelle en cacao, so to say. The absence of synthetics and the quality of the natural raw materials means that balance and complexity reign sovereign here; the perfumer's talent ensures that the chocloate-vanilla soufflé does not collapse into olfactory porridge; and the all-natural compositon prevents outré displays of sillage and intensity. It is, in sum, wonderful. The opening is powerfully citric-floral, I get stronger „orangey“ impressions from the tangerine over the tart bergamot and more white-floral aspects than rose (which, however, rises a bit later). Cocoa notes come into play very quickly and prompt associations of old fashioned hot chocolate made from the real thing rather than industrial powder. A wonderful olfactory baldachin of floral notes unfolds supported by the cocoa-vanilla scaffold, with the gentle iris building a bridge between florality and vanilla sweetness. The smokey earthiness of patchouli also gently holds hands with that aspect of the oh so multifaceted vanilla, the rest of the base remains softly at the back. Close to the skin you can cherish the lusciously complex exotic pod that our culture has so unjustly turned into a signifier of blandness. The whole composition settles down after about half an hour to a wonderfully woven skin scent with a gentle aura - gentle in no way connoting feminine here, but really a unisex quality. I actually feel it is the nose-searing loudness of synthetic gourmands tha project a sort of misguided hyper-femininity of the worst sort.

Chocolat Irisé is true to its name, a beautiful, classy, but easily worn pleasure scent recommended to all lovers of Guerlinade and traditional hot chocolate, friends of natural sweetness and spice, and those who have wondered why the can't handle gourmands, even though they love a fine dessert.

almost summer: atelier cologne

I have always been fascinated by Eau de Cologne, which in its apparent simplicity is a great challenge to any perfumer. As his correspondence and notes show, the inventor of Eau de Cologne, Johann Maria Farina, was obsessed with the quality of raw materials and oils, their distillation, blending and maturation and I believe it still holds today that in no fragrance genre is quality, and a reliance on the best naturals in particular, more important. I was quite excited to read about Atelier Cologne, which appeared on the scene in 2009/10 in the wake of the Eau de Cologne renaissance which has seen houses great and small coming forth with classic or modern waters (many of which I found to dismally fail the "Farina test"). The concept behind Atelier is to build on classic Eau de Cologne types, but increase the perfume concentration, so as to provide the desired freshness and lightness without compromising on longevity (thus avoiding Napoeleon syndrome, .i.e. dousing yourself with 20 bottles of EdC daily). This is a wonderful and challenging idea which has a few predecessors, such as Eau Sauvage (classic EdC plus Hedione), Eau de Guerlain, and a number of very accomplished scents by Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier's scents (e.g. Pour le Jeune Homme is a classic neroli cologne amped up to EdT status). But Sylvie Ganter and Christopher Cervasel are the first to build an entire house around high powered Eau de Cologne and it seems they are doing well. The fact that they are cooperating with quality suppliers Mane and Robertet, known for first rate naturals, increased my excitement. 

The free samples I graciously received were beautifully packed with postcard still lifes visualizing each scent and a brief prose fragment adding words. A great idea, the photography is well done, while the prose (in the English version) could use a little improvement in my opinion (but those are fine points).

The fragrances themselves,I feel, promise more than they deliver - but I must add that what I seek in an EdC, contrary to other perfumes, is not so much art, but a perfect referencing of nature. That's one reason why I feel the EdCs by Chanel and Lutens are monumental failures, apart from the fact that they smell like cheap bathroom products. But on to Atelier Cologne's foursome:

After a hesitant start, perfumer Ralf Schwieger's Orange Sanguine blossoms into a zesty, mouth-watering, true-to-life blood orange, but a pasteurized-juice feel soon catches up on this beautiful moment and when the florals set in, it becomes pure hotel soap, slightly reminiscent of Roger & Gallet's Extra-Vieille, in fact. That's nice, if you like it, but not what I seek in an Eau de Cologne and also not good enough for the money charged.

Top notes:	Blood orange, bitter orange
Heart notes:	Jasmine, geranium from South Africa
Base notes:	Amber woods, tonka beans, sandalwood

Trèfle Pur: A limey-citrus green with dusky notes. It lacks the purity of something like the body-splash like Extract of Limes by Geo. F. Trumper and will inevitably remind some folks of washing up liquid.  It quickly veers into shampoo or beauty-product terrain. I simply expect more from niche, though I know I rarely get it. 

Top notes:	Bitter orange, cardamon, basilic
Heart notes:	Clover absolute, violet leaves, Tunisian neroli
Base notes:	Patchouli, moss, musk

Grand Néroli is nice, as most nerolis are, but a bit too musky for my taste. The drydown has some smokey-amber which works well, but the scent is not convincing, becoming too intrusively synthetic as it progresses. Doesn't hold a stick to Xerjoff's Kobe quality-wise, but then virtually nothing else does in my book. Of the four sampled Ateliers, it is nonetheless my favorite.

Top notes: Moroccan neroli, chilled lemon, Sicilian bergamot, petitgrain Heart notes: Persian galbanum, moss, birch leaves Base notes: Clean musk, white amber, vanilla from Madagascar

Bois Blond is so extremely faint I suspect I am anosmic to some key ingredient. I smell pure spirit at the outset, and then a weak synthetic dark wood note. It just doesn't happen.
Official pyramid:

Top notes:	Tunisian neroli, pink pepper
Heart notes:	Moroccan orange flower, incense
Base notes:	Blond woods, musks, vetiver from Haiti

The Atelier colognes include some nice notes, but it is not one note that bryngeth summer - or maketh good cologne. The feeling of a really high-end, refreshing, natural Eau de Cologne isn't there, while the intensity and duration is not all that great in turn. The idea is great, the esthetic is accomplished, but I feel these scents will only satisfy, if you're looking for rather conventional fragrances on the light, fresh side. Personally, for the genuine Eau de Cologne experience, I'll stick with the classics and a few all-natural scents.

Guerlain's Gaffe

There's been quite an uproar about Jean-Paul Guerlain's remark in a television interview, that in creating Samsara "Pour une fois, je me suis mis à travailler comme un nègre. Je ne sais pas si les nègres ont toujours tellement travaillé, enfin…"

While I lack an indepth knowledge of French cultural semantics, I'm uncertain whether the translation in the Anglo media of "nègre" as "nigger" is not somewhat misleading, the former having been common public usage through the 1960s and beyond to designate blacks, and thus not dissimilar to the English "negro" or the German "Neger." These terms were used affirmatively by Africans and African-Americans, such as Marcus Garvey (1920s), Leopold Senghore(1930s) Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (1960s), while their use by "white" societies inevitably infused them with the ubiquitous racism of those societies, leading to a (difficult) shift to alternatives (Afro-American, African American, black, noir and others) since the 1960s.

The pejorative quality of the word and the turn of phrase, with the added callousness of questioning whether any black ever worked as hard as Guerlain did, is unquestionably injurious, uncivil and racist in nature. We can safely assume that M. Guerlain's days as a publicity instrument of the Louis-Vuitton-Moet-Hennesy-owned House of Guerlain are numbered. That a number of organizations will be pressing charges against Guerlain seems exaggerated though. We are not talking about Jean Marie Le Pen here, after all, and a legal course will achieve nothing. Vigorous protest and the opportunity to use this gaffe as a starting point for a reasoned discussion of racism issues in French society would seem a more promising path. But then it is not to be expected, that anti-racist organizations are immune to the baneful effects of media hysteria any more than any other institution and perhaps targeting one politically irrelevant old man is providing some psychological compensation for their utter helplessness in the face of the rising tide of European xenophobia as embodied by pathetic fearmongers such as Geert Wilders or the highly questionable policies of the Sarkozy government, for that matter.

Personally I'm saddened rather than angered by Guerlain's gaffe (then again, I'm white). I simply can't say I'm outraged by this haughty old man's public callousness in the same way that slavery in Mauretania or labor conditions in China co-sponsored by the West's shoddy consumerism outrage me. But you'd wish that a man like Guerlain, capable of such refinement and sensibility in his artful line of work, so well-travelled and cosmopolitan, was simply incapable of harboring a worn-out racist cliché of this sort. Such an insensitive remark from an obviously cultivated mind serves as a sorrowful illustration of how segregated and selective civility may be. Monsieur Guerlain, I regret to inform you that your status as gentleman has been revoked.

bittersweet musings under the boxtree

Here I am wearing an artefact, drops from one of those few forlorn bottles of the shipwrecked fragrance enterprise (un)known by the name Gobin Daudé. It's the first new - to me - fragrance in quite some time that has triggered reflections rather than just a mental shrug of the shoulders. I tried a few By Kilians this afternoon - it might have just as well been any other line - and found them just another permutation spit out randomly by the great niche perfume generator with its basic algorithms of absinth this and incense that plus iso-e and a tad of exotic gourmand. Uh yeah, me self-critically thinks, you're just a jaded fop with too many bottles of Dukes of Shmukes in your cupboard, but then I smell Sous le Buis, a real act, a quantum leap, of creativity, something refusing to conform to standard parameters, a natural perfume that no one could ever push into the aromatherapy corner, because it does those old names proud, those Guerlains, Carons, Chanels and sweeps the floor with all this ennervatingly conformist Vegas variety show playing 365 days a year, the Buxton-Duchaufour-Ellena Can Can. Yeah, you're geniuses, but I'm telling you the act, from where I'm sitting, is wearing pretty thin and who cares whether the manager made you do it. Call me a betamax bumpkin for praising a venture that failed, what's the point of making great perfumes that not enough people want to buy? Hell, ask the starving Schuberts, the impoverished Van Goghs. Victoire Gobin Daudé, wherever you are, you are a goddess, you have the power to breathe life into an assortment of oils, to grow a true French Rococo garden from molecules. You really do what a perfumer is supposed to do, to - apologies for borrowing Star Trek imagery rather than quoting Apollinaire - create a holodeck in a bottle. Here's a perfect rendition of a sculpted boxtree on a wistful, lusty spring day and as if that weren't enough you manage to remind me of the days when Nino Cerruti was a grand green masterpiece and show Jean-Claude what Eau de Campagne really should have smelled like. All this genius, all this beauty lost to a business plan that would not compute. Why? I don't know, don't even care, all I know is, I'm so tired, I'm so sick and tired (ah, my beloved Morrissey) of the mundane being sold as the sublime, at a premium. I've rarely played this game (no full retail for me, there are mouths to feed), but even just watching it is getting too much. But I'm no spoilsport, not that anyone would give a hoot for what I think, so this is for the eyes of hardened veterans, not to crush the enthusiasm of the young-nosed newbie. A salute to the few, who do no bow to the market, and as to the perfume industry per se, well, to quote the Mozzer once more, the world is full of crashing bores.

Craft and Modernity

Shockingly, my most satisfying acqusition in 2009 has not been a perfume - though it is perhaps not entirely unrelated to fragrance. Bear with me and find out whether you agree.
It was on ebay.uk that I stumbled upon the tea service pictured above. I had to have it and to my surprise managed to snatch it for a ridiculously low price (as in: "$500 for a bottle of the original 1882 Fougère Royale is a ridiculously low price"). You may not find the design overly impressive - functionalist ArtDeco, a typical 1940s bauhaus-inspired design - until I tell you that this set is actually older than Fougère Royale - pre 1872 to be exact. It is attributed (by Harry Lyons, Christopher Dresser: The People's Designer, p.205) to Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) perhaps the most radical and pioneering British designer of all times. A botanist by profession, Dresser promoted the adaptation of stuctural principles found in nature in design, as evident in his textile designs, while his boldly geometrical metalwork was also inspired by travels to Japan. Dresser wished to combine aesthetics, functionality and serial production, as well as being one of the first designers to sign his work, making himself a brand. He anticipated many bauhaus ideas by half a century. It's not surprising that Alessi still offers Dresser designs - you can purchase his radical teapot for a mere 4,000 Euros, the toastrack is a bit cheaper.
Now you understand why I had to have this (Art Nouveau, Art Deco and 'bauhaus' are my favorite design styles), but where in Jacques Guerlain's name is the perfume connection? Well, bingo. The blend of traditional craft and industrial modernity Dresser embodies immediately reminded me of the birth of modern perfumery pretty much coterminous with my wonderful tea set and embodied in the names of Coty and Guerlain. Coty reinvented perfume by embracing the products of new distillation technologies - super-pure power-absolutes previously unthinkable as well as synthetics such as coumarin and ionones. Coty and Guerlain also represented a new era of, by previous standards, mass production and professional marketing aimed at the new affluent middle class equipped with leisure and money and prone to consume the new wonder world of products, many of which had previously been reserved for the upper crust. Jicky is known to us as perhaps the living monument of the new modernism in perfume, both technically, aesthetically and sociologically and many of the principles and innovations it embodies are precisely those that define the work of Christopher Dresser. Thus, nothing could be more consonant than to pour myself a cup of Hajua Assam from my avant-garde teapot while wearing a fine old Guerlain (I personally prefer Mouchoir de Monsieur - 1904 - over Jicky) on my handkerchief. And dream of the glory days of (perfume) design.

...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)