Pon Farr

So subtle, arid, could it possibly be… pheromonal? Notes of peony, melon, the most identifiable pink pepper I’ve ever smelt in a perfume, white musk, and an unidentifiable candied red berry. Startlingly similar to Happy if it were made by Comme des Garcons instead of Clinique. Goes on insubstantially, I need 2 spritzes to get a read on it, then it brightens, the florals, fruits, and spice coming up. Then it fades again, everything disappears into a dryhot chemical odor that reminds me of Odeur 53, but much more similar to Bakelite bracelets left on a car’s dashboard in summer. Then it swings back to the unknown red berry candy scent, fading to just the white musk skinscent providing the constant undercurrent for the journey.

Marketed as the women’s perfume, it does try for a little imagination, its undercurrent of almost imperceptible musk providing a symbolic shorthand for the Vulcan mating-frenzy it’s named after. You could do much worse than this somewhat predictable floral-fruity number, you could try anything in the Britney Spears line, for example, and totally waste your money. For more on that, see below…

Red Shirt

Every single cleanfresh men’s scent of the past 20 years. Drakkar, Polo, Cool Water, yadda yadda yadda –but mostly Polo. Rotates thru the usual men’s scent notes:  lavender, cedar, citrus, “freshclean”, melon, musk…  Relentlessly generic, yet still better than I Am King by Sean John, which has a cynicism to its ruthless genericity that Red Shirt lacks. Both are generic mass-market-engineered inoffensive nothings which only sell because of their brand name; but I Am King sneers thru its megaphone “I suck, but you’ll buy me anyway because I’m a Sean John product, suckers!” Its smell is precisely, purposefully generic with a painful hollowness.

Red Shirt, on the other hand, much like the hapless extras sent to their doom each episode, is innocent of its true purpose in life. It thinks quietly to itself, “I have some good things going for me! I smell acceptable and nice, sorta like Ensign Aspen over there, who got laid last Shore Leave! If I do well in this away mission, maybe I’ll be promoted/get laid/live to see another day too…!” Its genericness is almost a direct copy of a successful scent archetype rather than an engineered amalgam of successful scent notes. As such, it’s an admiring ripoff rather than a careful corporate you-can’t-sue-us-we-stole-nothing clone. Usually I detest ripoffs, and one of the purposes of this blog is revealing the separated-at-birth scents ripping each other off, but in this case the cheerful naivete Red Shirt pulls off with its ripoff is almost admirable compared to the blatant corporate ripoff I Am King is pulling on its buyers.

It comes down to this: if you buy Red Shirt, you can smell like one of the sheep led to slaughter; if you buy I Am King, you become one.

by Geoffrey Beene, 1976

Lavender & mothballs. Violet leaf & oakmoss. Astringent. It’s a theme that’s been done to death in men’s colognes and aftershaves. Some consider this classic combo of scents to be comforting, a reminder of paternal figures in their lives, and it does say “quintessential classic masculine”, but it’s also acrid, sharp, and constantly on the edge of setting off my nasal allergies. As classic a combo as it may be, oakmoss mixed with lavender does a disservice to the oakmoss, and is practically a waste of a substance that’s already endangered in perfumery. Lavender is notably tricky to work with, being so camphoraceous and strong, so making it the center of a composition, instead of a supporting character in miniscule quantities, automatically means the star of the show will be LAVENDER! (–and some other players hanging around– don’t mind us…) If you’re feeling creative and trying to find a nominally novel way of presenting lavender, go right ahead, knock yerself out! I bet you won’t succeed. Lavender-centric scents have been a staple of perfumery since, well, lavender was discovered, and mixed with absolutely everything available at one time or another. And you know what they got? LAVENDER! (…and some other stuff, nothing to see here… move along, move along…) Better to stick to the well known presentations which have a track record of success. Sharp and boring as it is, you could do worse than the showcase for lavender that is Grey Flannel, much worse… you could try to formulate your own.

Mahora was renamed Mayotte after its introductory ad campaign failed. This discontinued perfume is widely vilified as a horror, is it because something so unsophisticated came out of the haute House of Guerlain? I don’t know what the hot fuss is about, Mahora is only tuberose.

Saying Mahora is “only tuberose” is like saying Michael Phelps is “only a swimmer”; both are understatements of the year, and both are a simple truth. There is tuberose, the complete tuberose, and nothing but a tsunami of the tuberose in all its waxy, tropical glory. It’s heavy, and absolutely nothing is added to lighten it. To wear Mahora is to suffocate to death in a very specialized, very niche candle store (Tuberose Yankee Candle Co.?) Luckily, it isn’t a strong perfume, its sillage is minimal and wears off exponentially within 4 hours.

I cannot stress this enough, to enjoy this you have to like tuberose! It may have an incense-y edge, but this is essentially a soliflore of natural (or damn good artificial), full-spectrum, god-given, this-one-goes-to-11 TUBEROSE. Despite the loud monotone, it isn’t a bad scent, it wouldn’t be so hated if it wasn’t from Guerlain; if it were a drugstore offering from Dana its sales would suffice and it might have become a beloved scent, a reminiscence of impoverished youth. Instead you embark on a failed safari in search of a nonexistant trace of Guerlinade.

Mandragore is French for mandrake, a historical, Biblical, mythical plant, reputed to cure barrenness & poisoning, give visions, & preserve vigor & youth. Its root sometimes forks, giving it a homunculus-like appearance, which supposedly screams when pulled from the earth, the scream itself deadly if heard. So much a source of folklore & legend, this infamous plant’s nearest relative is… the tomato! Unlike the early tales about its cousin, the mandrake is actually poisonous if eaten.

The perfume starts out lemony-vinyly, quickly followed by plasticky ginseng. The lemonyfreshness soon starts fading and the ginsengy layer slowly loses its vinyl elements, receding into the naturally-occurring plastickyness of ginseng instead of the initial artificial plastic-vinyl elements. Wearing further, a savory black pepperlike note appears with some other background spices, adding itself to the ginseng center note. The lemon topnote very faintly persists, and the pepper & spices wander to the forefront then recede again with the ginseng a constant dying-ballast hum in the foreground. And that’s it. Ginseng obviously is supposed to stand in for the mandrake, but it was so aggressively GINSENG! just like the vials of extract from Chinese groceries, that I couldn’t recognize it for anything else. Since mandrake fruit looks like a tamarillo, which is another distant tomato relative, I expected anything of mandrake to taste/smell of tamarillo, at least a little.

That’s all folks. It’s essentially a 3-note composition, and a very light-airy one, too. It was barely there, and didn’t last more than half the day. I suspect the Annick Goutal empire is more concerned how it’ll play as a candle or air freshener than as perfume, despite calling itself a “High Perfumery House”. With a name like Mandragore you expect something more witchy, dark, mysterious, exotic, eeevviiillll! Not a sweet, ethereal, will-o-the-wisp. You expect Morgana le Fay, not Tinkerbell.

… is actually a blurry spice trapped in the chewy center of a flower-flavored pastille. A plasticky eugenol note glows from it, evoking my grandmother’s lipstick or some other old cosmetic.

The trapped spice in question is mysterious: A peppercorn? Dried pepper leaf? Smoked tea? Tobacco? Sumac powder? Who knows. The flower-flavored pastille it’s trapped inside definitely has rose, but the clove-ish cosmetic element defies the definition of any other flower it might contain. As it wears, the powdery element of the clove pretty much takes over, leaving only the candyrose and a vague spiciness behind.

Though it evokes a very specific reminiscence of my grandmother, it’s still not emotionally engaging. It’s an unusual mixture of notes that work together well; the candysweetness says “young contemporary”, the rose & clove says “old-fashioned classic”, the spice even suggests “masculine”, yet… I’m still disappointed it wasn’t formulated better. It smells like a draft on the way to a much better perfume, one with a stronger spice element, more definable flowers, and only a touch of clove to hold it together. Instead we get this promising but unfinished sketch that’s somehow gained entry into the holdings of a world-class museum. I wonder, who’s its uncle?

This isn’t Chinatown in New York (or anywhere else). This is a mall, or maybe a carnival midway. It’s a caramel corn and cotton candy kiosk next to a Yankee Candle Co. You don’t wear this scent, it wears you. There’s a faint whiff of rotting chicken in a dumpster in the parking lot; funky in a gross way, not a cool way. Simple, but not boring, the scent ages exactly the way the objects of the scents it presents would age; the caramel corn starts smelling stale, the incense/potpourri candles fade, the cotton candy dissolves and the dumpster scent goes flat at further distances. It smells puerile, and flirts with the edge of disgusting and tawdry, almost falling over. It communicates skankiness without musk, leather, or any of the usual animalic scents used in traditionally skanky perfumes. It does this using sweet and familiar scents, perfectly illustrating a very, very underage bad girl. This perfume should be named Lolita, not Chinatown.

Despite all the jailbait associations, I don’t hate it. It’s very much not boring. Like rubbernecking at a car accident, it holds your interest. There is nowhere I can possibly wear this perfume, it isn’t appropriate for anywhere I go, smelling like I live in a candle store and regularly roll in stale caramel corn is SO not work-appropriate, and will annoy people in any public venue. It is, however, perfect if you are: 1) Going to a carnival while drunk/high, 2) Regularly pick up teenage boys at the Abercrombie & Fitch, or 3) Are 15 and take your baby along for the other two activities.

You’ve seen the commercial: Sarah Jessica Parker in character as Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, kicking in a shop window to get at a bottle of Covet, then getting hauled away, maniacally hissing, “I HAD to have it!” Of course after a hysterical ad like that, I HAD to have it for my next review!

At my local Macy’s I sniffed the bottle, another sweet fruity-floral, oh yawn. I wouldn’t kick in a shop window for this. Normally I’d put it down and move on to another bottle, but in the interest of a fair review… (ok, you can stop laughing now….. really….. are you done yet? Thank you) I made a small sacrifice, I spritzed some directly on my arms.

After determining I wasn’t melting like the Wicked Witch of the West (which Sarah Jessica Parker uncannily resembles), I found I smelled like a spicy, candied apple pie… with a bouquet of white flowers drooping over it… and Mom’s Tussy deodorant accidentally smudged on the apple slices before baking. Oops.

The Tussy middle note lasts for a while, then fades into a generic
vanilla-woodsy scent, which lasts for hours. The Tussy adds a slight
trashy edge to the generic trendiness, much like the character of
Carrie. Compared to the other Sarah Jessica Parker perfume, Lovely (a
ripoff of Beautiful by Estée Lauder) this is only a little more
interesting, but still a generic fruity-floral. So what’s all the hype
about? Certainly not the intriguing but short-lived appley-spicy top
note, nor the generic floral note, definitely not the Tussy. Covet it?
Not so much.

It’s hard to be snarky about violets, they’re soft and purple-smelling, and are about the only choice if you want to say “innocent” without cloying sweetness, tho historically, they apparently mean something else. Après l’Ondée (After the Heavy Rain) is all about violets, it’s got violets out the wazoo! Picture that for a moment….

Remember the end of “Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal” by e. e. cummings?

. . .
perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the
sternly allotted sandpile
–how silently
emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor?

ono.
comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush
. . .

Apparently, violets mean something else to mr. cummings.

That “ono” allbyitself isn’t just “oh no” or even a certain aging Japanese princess/performance-artist-breaker-up-of-infamous-rockgroups. Ono! This is referring to Odo-ro-no, a “toilet water” sold to prevent “excessive perspiration.”
It’s still sold in Canada as an antiperspirant. One could guess, based on mr. cummings’ reference that it once smelled like violets.

Speaking of infamous rockgroups, The Who used Odorono as a reference to consumerism and banality much as e. e. cummings did, but in a less scatological vein:

. . .
She ripped her glittering gown
Couldn’t face another show, no
Her deodorant had let her down
She should have used Odorono

Odorono could have saved your day
Could have helped her to get the part
Odorono and he would have stay
To help her to save her heart.
. . .

Wait, this is a scent blog, not an arts & humanities blog… I think…

Après l’Ondée is an old perfume, it’s not well known in the U.S. Perfumistas everywhere are gaga for it, and usually in the same breath proclaim its sibling, L’Heure Bleu, to be even better. Après l’Ondée’s famous violet note (which disappears in less than 10 minutes), is followed by a very light powdery scent whose volume turns down to zero very swiftly. Hope to god, dear reader, you don’t take a serious shine to this one, at about $100 per ounce you’d go broke spritzing it on 5 times a day just to get a whiff!

For all the artistic allusions in recent history of Violet = Cheap B.O. Coverup, it’s just “purple” to me, not a complex scent at all. For everything “purple” you’ve ever smelled that wasn’t fake grape, it was probably fake violet. Hand soap in rest stop rest rooms and scented fancy grade-school pencils comes to mind, but of the two the pencils are the stronger association for me (oops! my demographic is showing!).

This is not my grandmother’s perfume, this is my (and your) great-grandmother’s perfume. Save your money, move on to shinier, newer consumer goods with fresher allusions, not overpriced ones weakly scented of violets. There is no point to this perfume’s existence. Please, just Let It Be.