How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and scent and sillage
My soul can reach, when feeling anosmic
For the ends smelling and ideal trace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most noisome need, by sun and iPod-light.
I love thee secretly, as men strive for gain.
I love thee obsessively, as they turn towards praise.
I love thee with the passion put to ill-use
In my old Giorgio, and with my teen-age’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to use
With my lost sense. I love thee with the breadth,
Scent, jasmine! Of all my life; and if Thierry choose,
I shall but love thee better after anaphylaxis!

Jasmine. Wood. Musk. Grape. Loud. Strong. Sublime. Allergenic. Beware.

(apologies to Liz Barrett Browning)

I can’t detect the tobacco in Ambre Narguile, and Tabac Blond is to blame. In the varied and illustrious history of tobacco-based perfumes, this is the 900-pound gorilla. When the writer of One Thousand Scents wrote his own entry on Ambre Narguile, he emphasized the tobacco. I commented on his post that I didn’t notice tobacco in it much. In my own post on Ambre Narguile, I focussed on its foodier aspects, I didn’t mention the tobacco because, to me, it was so non-existent and fleeting.

That’s because Tabac Blond is a Virginia tobacco barn full of the lightest, sweetest, richest, Grade A tobacco leaf hanging to dry. No tarriness, just sweet, sweet, mellow, unburnt leaf. There’s maybe a bit of musk and definitely some orris, a touch of some white flower accord, but everything else is incidental to the point of the scent, which is tobacco, and nothing but. It’s so strong I expect to find nicotine stains on my fingertips every time I apply it. The blond in the name refers more to the shade of the tobacco, and only metaphorically to a Veronica Lake-style femme-fatale  …one who’s about to light a cigarette, raising one deadpan eyebrow at the leading man’s best pickup line, nullifying it.

by Thierry Mugler, 2001

Thierry Mugler is an artist at the high-low fashion tightrope walk, because his Cologne is a real work of postmodern art. It starts by smelling like a better-made, more expensive version of 4711, all fresh and citrusy, and you’re thinking, “Hey, ok, highend 4711, dude!”. Then all of a sudden you’re wearing highway reststop bathroom soap, “Whoa! WTF?” (yes, my inner voice sounds like Keanu), which evolves into the barest hint of Nag Champa incense and aftershave lotion, then something fresh-herby starts morphing into Un Jardin en Méditerranée, suddenly zigs away from that luxe smell, zagging back into the reststop bathroom. All this in under 5 min. Then it starts all over again; or, really never went away, just revealed more of itself over time.

Sound complicated? It’s not, it’s very straightforward and simple smelling. Mugler’s scents tend to be rather direct and no-nonsense, hitting you upside the head with their obvious-yet-weird mashups of quotidian accords: Angel=chocolate-musk-vetiver-licorice, Alien=jasmine-wood-musk, and this? Citrus-pink public bathroom soap-incense-herbs. If fashion is the line between taste and trash, this is a work of genius.

I finally tried it. I’ve never actually worn it before, only sniffed and dismissed it as yet another old aldehydic menace like No. 5.

I applied a few drops to my wrists and neck, and nearly scrubbed it right off. Those nasty aldehydes almost drove me to my knees, but just as I was passing out with the image of a WWI gasmask-readiness poster as my last coherent thought, the chemical topnotes dissipated sufficiently for me to regain full conciousness…

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time…

“Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen

After that, I had to leave for work.

While driving, the middle & base notes creeped forward, the warm vanilla note for which Shalimar is famous hummed up from a dim filament to radiant full glow. A different chemical-musk-greenish middle note also appeared with the vanilla; cheap shampoo filled the air, and until it dissipated I couldn’t shake the feeling I hadn’t rinsed my hair out completely. This is the note co-opted into copycat spinoffs and background scents for toiletries, much like No. 5 has been. Evidently, this is the cheapest component of the scent. One of those cheaper scents, such as B&BW Warm Vanilla Sugar, fly by these notes, zooming directly to the vanilla. But Shalimar is on a train, and is concerned with the journey itself, not the mere vulgarity of “getting there”.

I’ve read this is a blend of burning rubber, vanilla, and car exhaust contained in a rubber hockey puck bottle. Intrigued with the description, I hunted for it, and hunt I did. Department store perfume counters, perfume discounters, and even Nordstrom seemed barren of it. I found every other color of Bulgari scent (Jasmin Noir made me pause for awhile, tho), except for Black.

Just when I thought I’d have to flush it out online …lo and behold! I wandered over to the men’s side of the new Sephora at the mall… Eureka! Hidden behind a box of some vile Armani scent; there it was, Mr. Black Hockey Puck himself!

Spritzed on paper, it’s surprisingly sweet, musky, and vanilla. On skin the industrial odors materialize…. It isn’t burning rubber, it’s melting polystyrene! it’s the sweet scent of touching a soldering iron to a foam drinks cooler, a melting plastic scent that has nothing to do with the vinyl-plasticky aldehydes in most perfumery. There’s a resinous smell mixed in with the vanilla, a slight spicy-syrupiness –Styrax or Benzoin? Rosin or Retsina? Maybe…

So who wants to smell of melting (not burning) plastic and vanilla-retsina syrup?

I DO.

It’s magnificent, evocative, unique, inspired, and just plain weird. It’s a shared-custody weekend at my dad’s place, playing with his soldering iron by testing what it’ll burn thru and wasting his rosin-core solder, followed by grandiosly buffoonish pseudo-academic baking experiments we were fond of, (e.g. Confectionary, My Dear Watson: The Effects of Vanilla Extract Infusion upon Apple Pie… an Experiment in Six Parts).

This scent is fascinating, odd, jarring, and sentimental (ok, maybe just to me). It’s a post-industrial-waste barren racetrack rush-hour experiment gone wrong all the right ways. A polyharmonic Penderecki concerto kind of fragrance, a harmony of perfect dissonance.

This is a discontinued fragrance that I was lucky enough to buy before it disappeared forever (Note: Basenotes lists it as still in production. Where?!), most likely discontinued due to supply problems. Sandalwood from India is now so rare & expensive it probably became cost-prohibitive to have a line of mere toiletries based upon it. Sandalwood from Mysore, India in particular is now extremely rare, overharvested, poached, and is now threatened. There’s sandalwood from Australia, but it smells differently, a little more astringent and lacking the fruity undercurrent that Mysore sandalwood has. There are unrelated trees called “sandalwood” whose oil is marketed as “sandalwood oil” but the scent only bears a passing resemblance to sandalwood. Also, one if the ingredients listed on the bottle is diethyl phthalate, used to denature the alcohol (no making cocktails out of your cologne!). Due to the current hysteria concerns about phthalates lately, I suppose they couldn’t bring that back, either.

Yes, Crabtree & Evelyn have a Sandalwood toilet water in production, but it’s not the same thing, believe me. The current C&E sandalwood scent is a wan, pale pretender to the throne of this magnificent original, it might even have a bit of real sandalwood (from Australia?) in it, but it’s so damn weak it’s unidentifiable. Hell, any scent in it is pretty much undetectable! I’ve sampled it twice and neither time did anything blossom from this Void of Nothingness, like it did from Kenzoair. They’re probably using some artificial sandalwood scent in the mix to save $$$$, which isn’t working. The artificial “sandalwood” scents always lack the depth of the real thing. Each chemical may capture one facet of the scent perfectly, but it’s only one facet, and very lackluster. Combine several and you may get a better approximation, but still the soul, the quintessence is missing.

But the original’s sandalwood scent is deep, mellow, and rich, and surprisingly sweet. That heavy hippie-deodorant spicy astringency sandalwood can fall into is expertly rounded with ylang-ylang and a touch of cedar and vetiver. When first applied, the top notes are a very sweet ylang-ylang, a bit of cedar, and the sandalwood slowly follows behind, blooming in about 20 minutes as the ylang wears off, then it’s smooth, polished sandalwood all the rest of the day. When my bottle was new, the sandalwood would leap out at you, pleasant and civilized, but insistently there. Now that it’s older, it’s mellowed like wine does, and makes a graceful appearance instead of announcing itself loudly. As much as I love this scent, I shouldn’t wear it on my skin, for some reason it goes sour and a little rotten on me in a few hours (perhaps the ylang aging like a gardenia?), if I apply it to my clothes it’s glorious all day.

I wore this as a teenager and into college. At the time, Giorgio, Polo, Drakkar Noir, and Aspen was all the rage, and though I have a special place in my heart for Giorgio & Drakkar (the snotty girls wore Aspen & Polo), this C&E scent is what really evokes my teenage years.

It’s now had it’s day in the limelight, (or been eulogized). Time to be tucked back into its bubblewrap and put back to bed…

This one is an unusual case, how it smells in the bottle or even on paper is absolutely nothing like its scent on skin. I usually go thru perfume aisles sniffing the bottles themselves (please don’t have a heart attack, it works for me!), stopping & spraying when I find something different than the usual. Badgley Mischka’s bottle smelled oily-coniferous and vaguely musty, not musky, with some unidentified fruit waving frantically on a desert island while the ocean liner bulk of rest of the perfume sailed past. On a paper strip it smelled a little more coniferous, a lot less musty, and the musk started to come out; the fruit caught the attention of several passengers on deck, even distracting some from a shuffleboard game (that they wanted find an excuse to end anyway).

When I put it on my skin, the ocean liner ran aground on the desert island (was the helmsman distracted by the frantic castaway?). The carved fruit displays on the 24-hour buffet splatted on the dinner theater floor, the showgirls in the Carmen Miranda Extravaganza! show lost their footing on the 100% more banana peels than was in their contract, adding the contents of their costumes to the total, now approaching 1000% tropical fruit in addition to the random explosions of pineapple when sliding audience members accidentally kicked them in a bid to rediscover “upright” due to the tilt of the run-aground ship. Meanwhile, on shore, the castaway gleefully boards, bringing his entire supply of fruit and the occasional coconut he scavenged to stay alive on the island. Saved at last!

So, I was a little surprised at the difference.

BIG FRUIT. Big! Reaaaallly big. Luscious, juicy, fruity… um, something… Heavenly pineapples? Rainforest peaches? Opium gooseberries? Not sure which fruit this would be… some designer’s idealized fruit punch. With musk. And something that smells (to me, anyway) of black locust tree blossoms. No matter, it ages rapidly, in one hour you’re left with a light powdery muskiness and one sweet unknown fruit note, the riot has disembarked and the cabin boys swept the mess over the side. At $90 for 100ml, it’s too expensive a ticket for a 3-hour tour (if you’re lucky). Bon voyage!

Yes, it is beyond paradise, off the plane, down the jetway, into the the shuttlebus, back to the car, up the highway, through the ‘hood, back home to my backyard and a flying leap into the brambles on my hillside… because that’s where my wild honeysuckle is! (I’m writing this right now on my deck, sniffing the blossoms in the air). Beyond Paradise is a white floral melange dominated by honeysuckle, and almost ruined by a touch too obvious artificial musks and too liberal an application of other white flower scents. Happily, it backs away from that cliff, showing off its excellent sense of balance. Estée Lauder has succeeded in bringing a classy yet casual white floral to the masses, it’s a popular, accessible scent, fairly affordable but not cheap, produced by a quality but not exclusive brand. One could almost say it could (or should) be this decade’s Giorgio, except for 1 thing, its lasting power.

You spray it on, wait for the alcohol to evaporate, and are subjected to those light artificial musks right away a second before the flowers hit, then the musks go away with the alcohol, and you’re treated to the white flowers framing the star of the show, honeysuckle. The musks reappear slowly about 2 hours later, and by then the flowers have faded into a sort of dead gardenia sourness. Reapply and it starts all over again. But 2 lousy hours?! Come on! Only Après l’Ondée is shorter lived than this! Lord knows the room deodorizer-esque B&BW version of honeysuckle will last as long as Twinkies (if you can stand to wear body splash with a half-life). Some would argue compared to Giorgio’s steroidal strength (…able to create corporate anti-fragrance policies in a single bound!….), this might be a blessing.

I love me some honeysuckle, but no commercial fragrance has got it quite right. So I’ll just sit on my porch and sniff the real thing, thankyouverymuch.

Walk into any Anthropologie store and the air is filled with light florals & fruitness, crisp paper, & a slight scent of wool & bark, all spelling out “eclectic girliness”. Walk into a Gap store and it smells like their men’s scent G7, a “personalized” line of bland, flat, boring pine/citrus/soapy men’s colognes, spelling out “hipness thru conformity”. So, it perplexes me that The Gap is condensing, bottling, and selling the air from their fancier, more fringey competitor on the upper level of the mall. Although Anthropologie sells many scents (from 3rd parties) themselves, and their scents add to the ambiance of the store, you still wouldn’t get Mandarin Jasmine if you bought a bottle of each and mixed them. You’d get a rottenfruit-stinking mess and a ruined $180 handknitted sweater. And possibly a very cute coffeetable book. And glassware you HAD to have (it was on sale!!)

Nevertheless, Mandarin Jasmine is another Gap scent from their GapBody line of eau de toilettes, and like its stable mates it’s a simple composition drawn from cheap chemicals; components you recognize from their uses in laundry detergent, air freshener, and dryer sheets, but formulated with subtlety, lacking the chemically assaultive edge that Bath & Body Works seems incapable of avoiding. Its notable predecessors, Dream and (the late, lamented) Grass are also fine examples of Gap Gets It Right. The former evoking Cheer laundry powder, but milder and less assaultive yet equally evocative; the latter is exactly like smelling a freshly mown, pure, damp lawn while on an acid trip (Exactly!).

Mandarin Jasmine’s not particularly orangey, nor are its artificial florals obviously jasminey, it’s a whispery fruity-floral. Thanks to the Magic of Chemistry, it conjures the scent of paper from a world where you can smell the materials each thing was made from. This clean, crisp paper scent smells of wood. The scent doesn’t evolve as you wear it. It isn’t sophisticated, nor seductive, nor strange. You put it on and feel like wearing a $150 petite floral cotton dress, listen to a random wispy-voiced singer/songwriter chick on your iPod, and go make cute tote bags out of your old socks…. but not like shopping at the Gap.

A “men’s fragrance” that’s fresh & airy, airy & fresh! If the bright, clear fields in an antihistamine ad have a scent, this is it. When first applied there’s some slight citrus, lemon or grapefruit –the mythical kind that juniper bushes produce. A tiny whiff of wild herbs follows: think heather & weeds, not cooking; but the central feature is a spectacularly bright-fresh post-rainstorm brisk aquatic smell. This fresh-airiness is most likely courtesy of Iso E Super, a chemical that reportedly smells like fresh air and conifer wood (I do not yet have my own sample of Iso E Super, available from Escentric Molecules, which packages it as Molecule 01 [UPDATE: Turns out this isn't a solo chemical, they blended Iso E Super with a few other scents to "round it out". Thanks. A. Lot.]).

Many, many perfumes use this chemical, but few as obviously as this one, and also Air by Kenzo (or Kenzoair, as Kenzo prefers). It presents an idealized, very very faint interpretation of a cedar forest in the clouds with a cool wind skimming thru….. so minimal there’s almost no there there. Herrera’s fragrance has fresh air from somewhere completely else, some place with fewer pine trees, and everyone there has already attained satori. Instead of the cedar cloudforest of Kenzoair, Herrera for Men has citrus-rain on the plain in Maine (perhaps, but definitely not in Spain). The Iso E Super adds an inspiring eye-opening happybrightness to this scent that Kenzoair bypasses on its way to its next zazen session. Comparing that to the post-rain plain in Maine (or maybe Heaven or Mars, whatever, it’s out of this world!) illustrates the very different moods one chemical can evoke by perfumers with skillz.