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A friend handed me a sample of this [Valentino Donna] last month. Sweet, almost cloying, but in a way I kind of like - similar to a mall brat or a hey-I’m-so-popular girl scent. Perhaps for someone much younger, they’d think it was sexy, feminine, and the ideal scent to let linger on sheets. On a late-30s woman, it smells a little try-hard, unoriginal. I still like it though; it makes me feel a little foolish but in a good way.

The sample card says:

“An Italian chypre fragrance with a sensual, luminous feel. The surging bergamot reveals the powdery radiance of iris pallida and the voluptuous femininity of rose essence. Enveloping leather notes blend with vibrant patchouli to underscore the bold signature.”

Strange to read the word “vibrant” paired with “patchouli.” There’s a first for everything!

VALENTINO DONNA ACQUA

2017 fragrance campaign

Maartje Verhoef and Clément Chabernaud by Alasdair McLellan

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For them, what comes across is a smell of fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike, one of them said.

Steve Pearce from Omega Ingredients on recreating the scent of space. The Telegraph, October 2008.

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Nest’s Midnight Fleur

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Notes: Exotic Woods, Black Amber, Patchouli, Night-Blooming Jasmine, Vanilla Orchid

Sometimes, when I read about perfume and the notes, I wonder about the semantics of the marketing - what on earth does “Exotic Woods” even mean to a consumer? I don’t think it means even half as much as “Amber” or “Patchouli” - however even the ‘notes’ need to sell a fantasy so “exotic woods” has crept into the lexicon, and when you google what this *actually could mean* you just come up with a plethora of fragrances also selling “exotic woods.” I have an instinctual knowledge of what this means (atmospherically spicy, woody, aka sexy scents), but getting a cold definition is difficult, perhaps due to the marketers’ selling of a fantasy but more likely, nobody wants to reveal their secret ingredients. Stripping away those stories from perfume sure is a bummer.

That being said, Nest’s most popular fragrance, Midnight Fleur, is chock full of “exotic woods” and it smells pretty heady, heavy and incredible. I’m reminded of bold ‘80s fragrances - and with a Reagan-esque man in the White House, perhaps that’s apropos. What’s next, big shoulder pads? Just sayin.

(When I was in elementary school, all my teachers wore super heavy scents like Poison and Youth Dew, even Shalimar! I don’t think it was until the ‘90s that these bursts of spice were deemed improper (cK One is still sold, you guys!), however nowadays it seems like everything is permissable. I’m fine with that, to be honest, but I know many perfume haters who are *not.*)

Midnight Fleur opens like an explosion of femininity, but in no way immature or youthful. It is the scent of a thousand flowers drenched in amber, it would go well with coffee and a cigarette, a freeze-dried hairdo and skin-skimming sheath. It’s part nude hose and spiked heel; both vintage and here is the future. Fragrantica says it’s “moderate,” I’d give it a firm “heavy.” Beautifully balanced, it is one of my favorite scents in recent memory.

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The Smell of Unconditional Snorgles

(Springender Hund by Rudolf Koller, 1856)

I became a “pet parent” last year, well - more accurately, September of 2016. I take a ridiculous amount of pictures of my dog, I think about her all the time, I worry about her health and wellness and happiness (dog walker, pet insurance, BarkBox subscription, everything - check). I have always been an animal lover, but this is the first pup of my own, as an adult. We’d had pets growing up, but a childhood family pet is different - you’re not truly responsible for the life and livelihood of the little critters, you coexist under someone else’s roof and if things go bad, (hopefully) an adult or parent will pick up the pieces. Now that weight rests on my shoulders, and it has been thrilling and lovely, but also anxiety-inducing and heart-wrenching and “dear God, what have I done!” has entered my mind more than a few times. Falling in love always means there will be a falling out of love, aka a death, looming in the future, and these sorts of emotions and horrible thoughts are amplified when you suffer from anxiety.

But for now, each day is a blessing with her. Perhaps that is one of the more gentle lessons about love and anxiety - whether it be a person or a pet - that you make each day count because loss is somewhere along the timeline. I sometimes wonder if normals have this same thought process? I constantly worry about loss, using words like “I can’t imagine” which is absurd considering I imagine it really quite frequently. So within the anxiety of love and loss, there is this gift, where we see the forest for the trees, and we take in moments and know their worth. For that I am grateful. And one of the things that endears me to this silly, wonderful, lovable pup is her smell.  Growing up, our family dog had a very strong scent of a sporting dog. He most often smelled like the proverbial “wet dog” - that rank, fishy, dirty dog smell. I’ve been around other people’s dogs and they never struck me as smelling particularly good; they smelled like dogs. And I realize this is a personal journey of scent - to love the way your own dog smells. I realize this is because I love her and am bonded to her. But when you kick that logic out, I gotta say... my dog smells like sunshine. She smells like dried hay, clean feathers and homemade blankets. Sometimes I feed her salmon or tuna and she is a stinky little mess, but when she’s sleeping, curled up in a ball, she smells like a kitten (we even call her Kitty). Her paws don’t smell like Cheetos, they smell like saltines. Sometimes her ears get borderline offensive (which delights me to no end, because an unassuming dog being insulted by “you’re stinky” is hilarious to me), they have a stench of honey and puppy-body odor.

I know mothers and fathers love their babies’ smell, that we find our partners’ odors to be appealing and sexy, but I hadn’t read too much about falling in love with my dog’s smell. Does this make me a weirdo? Sure, why not. I’ll take it. *smothers face into pup’s fur*

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Lifting the veil on Queen of Sheba's perfume

It is one of the oldest fragrances in the world. Nicolas Baldovini’s team at the Institut de chimie de Nice (CNRS/UNS) has just discovered the components that give frankincense its distinctive odor: two molecules found for the first time in nature, named “olibanic acids” by the scientists. Their research results have just been published online, on the website of the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

It is mentioned more than twenty times in the Bible, where it is one of the gifts offered by the Three Wise Men. Frankincense (also called olibanum), one of the world’s oldest fragrances, is a gum resin that exudes from the bark of Boswellia trees, which grow in countries bordering the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It has been used for more than 6,000 years by every civilization, from Mesopotamia to the present. Regularly burned during religious ceremonies, it contributes to the very particular smell of churches. Despite its long history and the large amount of research dedicated to it, the exact nature of the molecules that give frankincense its distinctive fragrance surprisingly remained unknown. Read more.

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Eau de Toilet: Sneaking the Sexy In

The summer of stink has come and gone: the much-anticipated and literally deadly (smelling) Corpse Flower had a 3-hour wait in Denver, while The New York Times hit the streets with a perfumer and a sommelier, sniffing out trash, taxis and... toilet. Eau de toilette takes on a whole new meaning as IFF perfumer Céline Barel mentions that the superluxe fragrance they’re huffing has “fecal” notes; the daring and provocative note “makes the fragrance literally irresistible,” she says. And it’s true: that “fecal” note actually gives sexy fragrances their depth and sensuality – either in the form of indole or a variety of other animalic notes such as glands from the civet cat, musk deer, castoreum from beaver – all contrived to elicit les responses dangereuses.

Sometimes referred to as “skank” or “body funk,” these perfumes have probably crossed your mother’s dresser once or twice – in their original incantations, Guerlain’s Shalimar was blessed with nether-region odeur, the classic Shocking by Schiaparelli was created to smell like a woman, post-coitus and way post-shower, and even that “grandmotherly scent” Chanel No. 5 exploded with indole. The note appeals directly to the libido, almost like a deep, dark pheromone, so perfumers can essentially create the scent of sex and sell it too. It is the bottling of an aphrodisiac, one that you don’t necessarily even consent to sniffing – it will find you and waft up your nose, sans permission.

Covered by other notes so as to be a little more front door than back, the fragrance usually doesn’t necessarily evoke excrement, but it is lurking underneath. It’s a trademark of white florals in order to attract pollinators: jasmine is a rather popular natural culprit of indole, and even beloved orange blossom and tuberose are guilty of the gutter undertone. On a molecular level, it also has a lot in common with horse sweat. As a fragrance opens, it might smell sweet and fresh – if indole is used sparingly, it smells nothing like waste. If the molecule is used in high concentrations, however, it smells like… well, feces; some people even find it smells like “tooth decay.” Christopher Brosius, creator of CB I Hate Perfume, says, “To me, it smells more like dead flesh – and in high quantities, it gives me a headache and is downright repellant. However, broken down in fractions, and used well, it can be very, very attractive, sensual and human – a deep skin-like quality. If you cross that line, the scent loses its elegance and becomes unendurable.”

It’s in the small traces that the note gives a fragrance complexity, earthiness and that truer humanness; author Denyse Beaulieu paraphrases Dr. Paul Jellinek’s The Psychological History of Scent: “Though repulsive when smelled out of context, these subtle hints of the naked body were most frequently encountered in the act of love and therefore carried positive connotations.” Because it smells like sex, but also like life and death, perhaps indole is the most existential of the notes – and aren’t all flowers inherently sexual as well as morbid? We smell flowers as they are dying. We see flowers as they are boldly attracting pollination. Why wouldn’t they also smell of rot, waste and decomposition?

Neurologist Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell & Taste Research Foundation has a more Freudian take on the matter: “we like different odors, even ones that might be ‘disgusting’ because we admire what we create.” And by create, he does in fact mean, your fecal output. In terms of self-absorption, “olfactory narcissism” may be the root of our desire for this uncouth note. How much you like the smell, of course, is dependent on how much it reminds you of your own – or, to put in even more of an ick factor, how much it reminds you of something from your childhood. Perhaps trace amounts of a molecule that reeks of waste reminds you of a simpler, sweeter time rather than the last time you ravaged a partner. Either way, you are more drawn to a perfume with indole than without.

The range of brain-baffling rude scents - sweaty, musky “skank” scents, a word we’re most used to hearing in Mean Girls – give sex or nostalgic appeal through a variety of pungent smells: sweat (cumin), body odor or urine (grapefruit), fecal matter (white florals). They evoke the most sincere appreciation for nature – both in botany and anatomy. While some may turn up their nose, others embrace the stinky: the Corpse Flower garnered tons of visitors in both Denver and Chicago with its anticipated “limburger cheese, feet and rotting fish” odor, a natural emission to attract pollinators (apparently dung-loving insects are all that will do for the extremely choosey Corpse Flower) and people were legitimately bummed when the Chicago flower did not deliver in its grossness. And among perfume connoisseurs, unpleasant notes are an art form, the antithesis of a commercial product, a sign of an adventurous and skillful nose. Plus it doesn’t hurt that the arbiters of all things chic, the French, have been dousing themselves in sexy, elegant malodors for centuries and love it. Luckily for the olfactory anxious, a little indole goes a long way and perfumers know it, so you can inch your way in and smell just a little risqué rather than a whole lot raunchy.

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JJB: Anjelica, you remember things in such beautiful detail in your memoir, and now I’m going to ask you to remember a whole lot more. When we met, I was 11, you were 8, and your perfume was Blue Grass.   AH: Blue Grass. Wonderful, Elizabeth Arden, with a sketch on it of a small child riding a horse with its mane tumbling with blue roses. JJB: Admit it, it was the horse that got you… AH: It was a maiden on a horse, and maybe she was sprinkling the blue petals. But it was a lovely image and I liked the clear, fresh scent of Blue Grass. It was the first perfume my mother ever gave me. JJB: Did we go and buy perfume at Woolworth’s in Galway? AH: Undoubtedly. My favorite was—it was in a dark blue bottle… JJB: I don’t remember AH: No, it was really important. You know what, I think I might even have the bottle. Can you hold on a second? JJB: That’s typical. A bottle that’s almost 60 years old?! AH: Yes. Hold on: Soir de Paris! Soir de Paris! In the cobalt blue bottle. Soir de Paris perfume. JJB: Oh my god. And we got it at Woolworths? AH: It was in the exalted dish, the one furthest away from your creepy crawly little hands, where they could watch you, because it was really quite expensive.

Joan Juliet Buck interviews Anjelica Huston on Yahoo! Beauty in the article BFFs Anjelica Huston & Joan Juliet Buck Reminisce, from July 2015.

Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass is still available. I actually was just researching Soir de Paris for a history of perfume I’m working on - pretty sure the original is extremely rare, notes available to read here.

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Have to admit that I did miss the scent of different things; the inside of the space station is pretty neutral, like an air-conditioned room. Smells of food or people or the different scents of the modules were really all you'd notice or get used to. It was interesting to me that the different station modules did have a different smell to them (none bad, just different); you could float through different parts of the station with your eyes closed and tell where you were just by the smell or feel of the place.

Astronaut Nicole Stott in How To Look Your Best In Outer Space, today on xovain.

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“From my childhood I recall days spent home sick from school, trying on my mom’s clothes and watching television show after television show. I remember spooning out chocolate or tapioca pudding from the box - tapioca, a word no one uses anymore. The smell of the house, damp and distinct. The aroma of old indigenous L.A. houses, even inland ones, comes from the ocean twenty miles away, a hint of mildew, but dry, too, and closed up, perfectly still like a statue. I can still smell the barest trace of gas from the old 1950s stove, an invisible odor mixed with sunshine streaming in from the windows, and somewhere, eucalyptus bathed in the haze of ambition.” Kim Gordon; Girl in a Band, pg. 21.

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From July 20th - I write about how to keep your perfume smelling sweet on Refinery29.

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Coppertone & McDonald’s Fries

Nina: Your last thoughts are important, Claire.  They're all you get to take with you.  Claire: McDonald's french fries. Coppertone sunscreen.

Nina: I love that smell.

Claire: I was a mouse in the Nutcracker Suite three years in a row.

Nina: You were adorable. (Cake, 2014)

There is an endless array of old school Coppertone fans, Coppertone ‘knockoffs’ (Demeter’s Sun Tan Lotion and CB I Hate Perfume’s At The Beach 1966 come to mind) and odes to Coppertone on the internet. When I was watching the movie Cake a few weeks ago, the above words fell on me like a hammer. How perfect, how apt. McDonald’s French Fries, Coppertone Sunscreen and playing a mouse in the Nutcracker. While the next lines hold more weight and move the viewer even more (no spoilers!), these particular three beautifully light, elegantly dodgy symbols of youth and America held an intense amount of significance for me. I also thought - they certainly do have a tremendous impact on my memory via smell.

For one, the McDonald’s French Fry aroma is so strong, I almost feel like I’m eating them when smelling them. And science confirms that’s about right - the fries are cooked up in cottonseed-beef tallow oil which seals in the signature flavor, but the *actual* flavor, according to Fast Food Nation (with an incredible amount of research at IFF), is the smell of chemical gases being released as you chow down. “The aroma of food can be responsible for as much as 90% of flavor.” So you could feasibly chock up the iconic McD’s fries’ taste to scent.

Coppertone, however, is all fragrance. A coconutty, creamy paroxysm of nostalgia that lives in a rather positive, sunny place. My boyfriend is a Hawaiian Tropic fan, for similar reasons as to Coppertone fans - when you’re a kid, putting on sunscreen (whatever your brand) is associated with some of the best times of your life (I mean, hopefully). The beach, the pool, playing outside, being a kid. That strong bond between smell and memory is so impenetrable with sunscreen, it’s rare to huff that signature Coppertone scent and not be instantly transported back to something delightful. It’s absolutely ironclad marketing. 

The Nutcracker Suite has a scent to me, and maybe to you too - synthetic cranberries, plastic ornaments now 40 years old, the cool, sweet burst of pine. Maybe the sensation of velvet, candlelight, a speckling of snow. Like a sweet piercing through the heart. 

I actually enjoyed Cake, which I know the reviews are iffy. I found it subtle in some ways and a little too obvious in others. But the scene on the train tracks -  the scene about the fries, Coppertone and the Nutcracker - was positively lovely. Sidenote: Allure has been begging Coppertone to release their fragrance for ages.

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When I came back into the office that day, with Femme on my wrist, I apologized to the woman who works at the next desk over. Herman calls the 1944 iteration of this classic fragrance a “classic fruit chypre that smells like softness” and says that the cumin in the current version makes Femme more “wearable and modern.” But I found the cumin body-odorish in a disquieting way when paired with that cuddly, musky softness; the heart of modern Femme is like getting into a ripe-smelling cab, looking into the rearview mirror, and discovering that the driver is Marilyn Monroe.

Emily Gould in “How To Smell,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2014

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My first memory of scent was when I was six years old and my mother came to kiss me goodnight in bed,” says Dove. “She was going to a cocktail party and was wearing a gold lamé dress. As she walked to my bed she was lit up by the landing light as if she had a halo around her. She leant down to kiss me goodnight and I remember inhaling the smell of her face powder and it left an indelible impression on me.

Roja Dove in The Telegraph (4/27/15)

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This. Is. Incredible! I cannot imagine Chaplin dousing himself in a bottle a day - I’d be out the door too, that sounds like one hell of a headache after a while. FABULOUS.

DO YOU KNOW - Mitsouko, 1919

            When I first encountered Mitsouko, I couldn’t put into words what I was smelling. It was bold, round, smooth, spicy, exotic and almost regal. To me it didn’t smell feminine, it was genderless. This is a  scent from a different time when fragrance was made to  to be worn by men and women alike. A man did not need to smell like a smoky dirt road nor a woman of a candy cane. Just as Charlie Chaplin adopted it as his signature scent, I too wear Mitsouko daily. There are perfume’s I love - Guerlain’s other masterpiece, Jicky is close to my heart, but while I enjoy others, when I wear Mitsouko, I feel complete. Perfume is a personal choice and in some ways a truly intimate relationship. Not everybody loves my choices, but for me, scent is more about the wearer and less about what other’s think one should smell like. 

Read More

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Shalimar by Guerlain

Photo found at JanMoranWrites.com

I have loved the very idea of Guerlain’s Shalimar for years - always thinking it was a *real* grownup fragrance, the alternative classic to Chanel No. 5. I never tried it on, I never even considered buying it for myself... until this year.

The history of the fragrance is very interesting (I mean, of course, it’s an almost hundred year old concoction) - it was created by Jacques Guerlain in 1925 in honor of the Shah Jahan / Mumatz Mahal (yes, of Taj Mahal fame) love story. It’s called the “first Oriental” fragrance - and it is, to be quite blunt, intoxicating and almost overbearing. It is not for fooling around. Well, it could be for *that* kind of fooling around, but it is not for people who do not like scents. It’s about as subtle as head trauma - it goes over like a lead balloon. For milestone birthdays, which I consider to be every 5 years, I like to treat myself to something extra special. When I was 25, I gifted myself a silver Dolce & Gabbana skirt (thank you, student loans! I managed those terrifically!). When I turned 30, my parents gave me Acqua di Parma Iris Nobile (can’t stop won’t stop, one of my absolute favorites). This year, my sister sent me a gift card and I used it to purchase a big ol’ fat bottle of Shalimar Eau de Parfum. It came in yesterday and UPS wouldn’t leave it unless someone signed for it. So I actually managed to work from home (we don’t really do that at my company) - that’s how important this perfume is to me. I sat, waiting for a bottle to come, and if someone had told me no, I would have just had to say I was sick. It came in the afternoon, I opened the box... and I held it as though it were a diamond, it was so precious and out of my league. The thing about perfume, especially to a perfume fanatic, is that it is an undeniably special moment to receive it - especially if it’s for an occasion, and especially if it’s for a 35th birthday (*ahem*). I chose Shalimar because I needed something that had an incredible history, because I thought of flappers in the ‘20s dousing themselves in this heady spicy liquid, because I thought of women in silk taffeta in the ‘50s, spritzing their necks, cheating on their husbands, leaving traces of it on a fur stole, a tuxedo collar (this fantasy was heavily influenced by early episodes of Mad Men). I thought of storied women with a legacy bigger than the fragrance itself, their existence gone but Shalimar still lingering in the air like gravity. It does not lend itself to political correctness. There is nothing fair or just about this fragrance; it is for someone who sees herself as willful, powerful, self-possessed and deeply desirable. I don’t necessarily possess these qualities, but sometimes I want to. 

The first spritz is almost blinding - it burns the nostrils, it makes the head ache. When it dries down, the sniffer is overcome with softness, a paradox. The notes are bergamot, powder, vanilla, iris and amber - each able to hold their own in a fight, so when you get them all together on your wrist, you’re looking to get knocked out. I am reminded of my West Texas-born teachers in the 1980s with their huge hair and relentless gold jewelry - I never knew they wore Shalimar, but looking back, they so obviously did (it was either Shalimar or Poison). It smells like austerity, sometimes like bad breath and coffee, like a powder puff and uncomfortable clothing. It is big - bigger than big - it enters the room before you do. It is not playful, fun or girlish; this is for women who control their own destiny. It’s remarkable how absolutely astounding a fragrance can be, isn’t it?

I wore Shalimar to work today, complete with a burgundy sweater, ripped, cropped jeans, and a pair of Doc Martens. It somehow makes the grunginess of my outfit feel high fashion... perhaps a spritz is akin to confidence. I’ll be retiring the fragrance to nighttime only (it’s really strong, you guys), but it was worth it to smell in the New York City cold sunlight, just for the day. More on Shalimar: ”Your shit smells like Shalimar.”

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The scent of his scalp is indescribable, because it floods your senses with euphoria and happiness, like seeing a rainbow or eating cannoli.

The answer to the question: "What is the scent of Jared Leto's scalp?" on Refinery29's hard-hitting interview with @jaredletobraid.