Not-So-Square-Roots: Irises for Men

Summer is the playground of mediocre scents. Right now, I’m loving a tube of Versace L’Eau Fraîche shower gel for after the gym. My boyfriend is using Hugo Man. We both have tons of niche to choose from on a daily basis, but much of niche doesn’t have that fresh zip that summer in Manhattan requires (especially, if you’re wearing a suit and tie). But before we go completely off the deep end and start spritzing ourselves with something like I Am King, I’d like to recommend three clean and refreshing iris fragrances that can make it into any man’s routine.

First off, getting the equivalent of four stars in my book, is Heeley Iris de Nuit. Iris by its very nature gives the illusion of coolness. Orris -- the official name of the rhizome that iris flowers grow out of -- comes from under the ground, out of the sun. James Heeley’s interpretation is done with a cedar and angelica root accord that, for some unknown reason, reminds me of licorice. Me suspects some vetiver, but I may be wrong. Despite its name, its the perfect daytime scent: limpid enough to refresh but tenacious enough to not have you spraying yourself as the clock strikes each hour. This is how Prada should have done their iris, but they put their pennies into the packaging instead.

Tied for second are two other irises for the boys: Divine L’Homme de Coeur and The Different Company’s Bois d’Iris. The former, created by Yann Vasnier, puts its iris in a cocktail shaker with some juniper and cypress tinctures for a markedly sexy man effect; the latter, brainchild of Jean-Claude Ellena employs bergamot and narcissus, making it the most perfumey of the three.

If I were to choose the runner-up, it would be Acqua di Parma’s Iris Nobile Eau de Parfum. Sweet, fruity and floral -- and perfectly wearable -- though it leaves me asking: when did you lose touch with your roots, man?

Babylonics: Chaldée by Jean Patou

Here’s some food for thought: In 1930, the House of Jean Patou released “Joy” – right smack at the beginning of the Great Depression. “Joy” was an expensive perfume before the age of perfumes that needed to announce their expense. People were broke and dejected, and there was Patou himself – suffering due to the loss of precious American business – directing perfumer Henri Alméras to create an extravagant blend of 28 dozen roses and over 10,000 jasmine flowers. To this day, it stands as one of the great marketing coups of the last century.

Alméras himself had weathered hardship in 1925, the year his illustrious employer Paul Poiret went bankrupt (along with his beloved Parfums de Rosine label). Patou represented a new start for him. One of his memorable early creations was a complete succès de folie. Patou was banking on the newfangled vogue for sunbathing and tennis, and in 1927 had Alméras create a suntan oil called Huile de Chaldée for the jaunty young flappers who were laying themselves out on yachts and plages across the Mediterranean. The scent of the oil caught on, and later that same year the parfum version was released.

Chaldée was inspired by the ancient Babylonian empire which, I guess, stood out in Patou’s mind as a mythic dream of sun-drenched ruins and cerulean seas. Like Shalimar, which preceded it by two years, Chaldée leveraged the popular opopanax-amber accord in its base. Its formula was deceptively short, with notes of orange flower, hyacinth, jasmine, narcissus, lilac, the aforementioned accord and a warm nuzzle of what can only be (now-illegal) nitromusks.
Unlike other scents that share its birth year – Lanvin Arpège, Caron Bellodgia, Guerlain Djedi and Weil Chinchilla Royal – Chaldée lacks the ubiquitous geranium and rose in its base.

I love it for its jasmine and its long-lived amber core. It is casual for Patou, worlds apart from the opulence of “Joy” – but, then, who needs joy when the party is still in full swing, before the walls of Babylon have tumbled?

Djedi today?

First there was Cuir de Russie (Chanel, 1924), then Shalimar (Guerlain, 1925) and finally Djedi, Jacques Guerlain’s creation of 1926, launched in 1928 to commemorate the house’s centenary. A beautiful dry damask rose couched in civet and vetiver. It has the warm, soapy resinous quality of Shalimar and the smoky leather of Cuir de Russie minus the Grasse jasmine and ylang ylang. For me, it is the epitome of Art Deco like a John Hughes set from Night and Day or Rhapsody in Blue, though the woman who wore it probably wouldn’t have been caught dead in such crass glitz.

Would Djedi sell today? Considering the surprisingly endless appeal of Shalimar, I don’t see why not. Simply market it as Shalimar d’Automne d’Hokaïdo and watch it fly off the shelves.

Jasmine Too Girly for a Guy?

This morning I did something out of the ordinary: I pulled a volume of Cavafy from the bookshelf and read his 1915 poem “Orophernes,” while I sipped my cup of Assam (Golden Tips, for those theaphiles among you). I guess a poem about “delicious Ionian nights” was a good side to my northern Indian indulgence. What struck me most about the poem were the lines describing the royal Cappadocian ephebe “among the strangers” of Ionia:

In his heart was he ever the Asiatic,
but in his conduct and discourse a Greek:
arrayed in precious stones, in Hellenic garb,
scented all over with jasmine perfume.
Among the beautiful young Ionians
he was the most beautiful (ὡραῖος), the most ideal.

The Koine Greek adjective ὡραῖος comes from the word ὥρα which means “hour.” Beauty comes from ripeness, literally “of the hour” or -moment. Interesting, then, that the young Orophernes scents his body with jasmine, certainly the most indolic of smells (read “animalic”) – ripeness, indeed!

Jasmine eroticizes the youth, drawing attention to his fleeting hour of beauty “among the strangers.” I love how scent here makes quick work of the gender divide. It makes me wonder how, when a man or woman wears a scent at that appointed hour, regardless of all external limitations, it transforms him or her into an object of instant desire. This is the magic of perfume, the thing which has always made us view it as an elixir of love.

Good jasmines for men nowadays are hard to find. Caron’s 3-ème Homme comes to mind, along with Annick Goutal’s Le Jasmin (smoky and woody). Fougère accords traditionally used jasmine notes, but many shed them on account of added expense. I wonder what Orophernes would wear today, faced with a night out at the clubs. Any suggestions?

So.... I am raffling a sample of The Perfume House Private Reserve Yasminale, which IMHO is - along with vintage Joy - one of the most beautiful jasmine-lily of the valley perfumes available. The winner will be drawn from the pool of comments on this entry on Saturday, May 23.

Colonial Coffeehouse: Eau des Îles

For some time, coffee fragrances have enjoyed a certain vogue among the perfume cognoscenti. Maurice Roucel’s Riverside Drive, Jacques Huclier’s flanker for Thierry Mugler, A*Men Pure Coffee, Jo Malone Black Vetyver Cafe and the coffee granddaddy, L’Artisan Parfumeur’s L’Eau du Navigateur – each has showcased this ultimate comfort note, which, along with chocolate and tobacco, forms a triad of vanillin-packed scents. To smell a cigar humidor, a dark chocolate wrapper or, as is the case here in New York City, to walk past a branch of Porto Rico Importing Co., is to fall under the smell of the bean (coffee, tonka, cocoa or otherwise).

As some of you may know, I recently completed a move to a new space, and in the process many samples and bottles were jostled about ... which is to say that quite a few things, which previously languished in the dark, got their proverbial moment in the sun. Maître Parfumeur et Gantier’s L’Eau des Îles was among them, and now I am kicking myself for not having recognized (or better appreciated) its strong features years ago. Jean Leporte, who also was responsible for L’Eau du Navigateur, created it in the pre-gourmand days of the mid-Eighties. Taking a spicy, musky coffee note and allying it to the weedy note of galbanum, Laporte created something beautiful in its hardness – for lack of a better analogy, a sort of tropical flanker to Germaine Cellier’s galbanum-bombshell, Bandit (as recreated, of course, by the Guichard duo at Givaudan).

It is an unsung wonder, and if you like Bandit and, albeit for a very different reason, Patou’s Colony, this cup’s for you.

Getting Blade: Creed Acier Aluminium

A new love has come my way. Well, not exactly new ... but let’s just say, my eyes have been opened to his oh-so-clear-and-present charms. But his name is the daffiest thing this side of Greenwich Avenue. That said, Creed’s Acier Aluminium is no stranger to the high-end men’s fragrance scene. Released back, prenatus Vetrivressum, in 1973, he’s recently begun something of a resurgence in popularity among the sartorial set.

Lovers of Guerlain Habit Rouge will appreciate Acier Aluminium’s exploration of the cool-warm divide, its near-perfect navigation of a sort of Northwest passage of bracing citrus tropical fruit and plush––rather than furry––civet. If the latest Yves Saint Laurent men’s launch were a nighttime prowl, this is love in the afternoon. (But not al fresco. More like, on a king-size bed in a Richard Meier condo.)

And, what I love so much about Acier Aluminium (try saying that three-times-fast) is that it moves at its own very leisurely pace through a full-dress olfactory pyramid. The drydown alone, with its spices, ambergris and drop-dead-gorgeous vanilla absolute, is worth the price of admission.

Orientals are in sore need of reevaluation by men’s fragrance wearers, and like Le Labo Patchouli 24, Shalimar extrait, Habit Rouge and Opium pour Homme and the new La Nuit de l’Homme, Acier Aluminium should constitute a must-try for Summer 2009 and beyond.

Gilding the Lily: Amouage Ubar

Jasmine perfumes of the Islamic school can be notoriously ill-bred. Throughout the Middle East deft but cloying synthetics have inundated the non-alcohol-based perfume oil tradition. Each day, erstwhile scent merchants pawn off synthetics on a well-heeled unsuspecting clientele. And no one is the poorer for it. We’ve all been taught that synthetics are good, and indeed they are. But Hedione discussions aside, for me jasmine is the one big glaring exception. Some Middle Eastern jasmine perfumes are so roughly constructed that they only express one facet of this extraordinary blossom: a sweetness so sweet and unpleasant that it makes my teeth ache. In Mumbai, I ask myself, is there a toilet bowl cleaner that smells like this? And there very well may be.

All of which brings me to the reorchestration of Amouage Ubar, a fragrance for which words battle in my head for precedence: balance, authenticity, mystery, splendor, and spirit. And yet I want to dismiss them all, because, being so overdetermined, they push the concept above the experience. Simply, Ubar is a superlatively pretty perfume. And very well-done. It was blessed with another one of those pre-recession, spare-no-expense-like creative briefs that many perfumers would die to be able to execute, if only for the sheer rise that must come with ordering a kilo of top-grade jasmine absolute. Ubar is not revolutionary, unless in 2009 one still were to view the cuisine of, say, a Marc-Antoine Carème as pushing the envelope. I, for one, cannot accommodate very often, if in fact at all, an entire brace (a flock! people, a flock!) of roasted duck à la Brétonne, let alone a purée of hummingbirds’ tongues.

But, let’s face it, we only have so much patience for revolutionary fervor in our times. Look at all those Comme de Garçons scents of the nineties that people who “didn’t wear perfume” wore. Many were hideous. (If we’d stopped at the fashions, we’d have been great. But, lightbulb dust burning smells and carrion ... spare us, O Lord.) Luxury that masquerades as nothing but itself is perfectly OK by me. And a well-constructed perfume is hardly luxury; it should be a requirement of the industry. Strike one, strike two, you’re out. Better to have sold a few million bottles of Febreze or that Indian jasmine Toilet Duck I mentioned than to author some abominable pink bugspray.

Ubar continues that marvelous rounded approach to a dominant floral note that we found with Lyric Woman and Lyric Man. Creative director Christopher Chong and his perfumers know what they’re doing with the lily-of-the-valley note and those lovely basso registers of Bulgarian rose, sandalwood and civet. But here the aria is from a Massenet opera like Esclarmonde, instead of Verdi. And it’s not Callas at La Scala I’m hearing, but Sutherland at the Dallas Opera.

Chypres by the (Half-) Dozen

Some perfumes are haiku (and often not very good ones); some are chapters (longish in style––they make you crazily anxious for plot twist that, alas, seldom comes); and a choice few are what I’d call prose poems. These late winter days, this last is the category piques that my interest the most––and, within it, the great chypres: Coty’s eponymous creation, Guerlain’s Mitsouko and Sous le Vent, Carven’s Ma Griffe, Aqua di Parma’s Profumo (both iterations), and Amouage Jubilation 25.

Looking at them in front of me on the table is like regarding a group of siblings, their ages spanning nearly an entire century. A few brunettes, a redhead, one jet black, a blonde––but, boy, they’ve all got that nose. I won’t use a word like aristocratic, but Mitsouko, Profumo and Jubilation 25 strike me as the real achievers of this family. They take a vital lesson from their father: follow your heart but keep your feet on the ground.

The nucleus of each is a triad of florals that veer toward the complex: rose, ylang ylang and jasmine. (If you added some carbon rings, you’d have the architecture of Chanel No 5.) And while this floral heart is important to the overall caress of the perfume, it’s those feet that make the real difference. Fine patchouli, frankincense, labdanum, oakmoss and vetiver. The flowers still sing but the rhythm is quickened, and there’s just this wondrous sonorous depth when everything comes together that reminds me of one of the segments of Mussorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

There’s nothing old-fashioned about them, except maybe the connotation of a studied blue-stocking elegance. More of us should get to know them and their makers better, and should encourage and support their survival in a world of cotton-candy-air and soulless haiku.

Image: Mitsouko advertisement, c. 1976.

Hope through Carnations

If Shepard Fairey would like to donate his talents toward providing better PR for carnations, I would put him in touch immediately with Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, perhaps America’s most visually minded perfumer. Because it seems that they share an aesthetic. Her Oeillets Rouges are as high-contrast red as Red Square – all red cheeks, lips and hair flaming against a blue-black sky.

Let’s face it, despite being assigned a high place in Islamic art and culture, carnations aren’t exactly top-shelf in the West. In some societies, they’re even considered bad luck. (No surprise that when Coty released Oeillet de France in 1923, it was solely for export to the U.S.A.) Be that as it may, carnation soliflores are experiencing something of a mini-renaissance in Western perfumery. Witness two spectacular JAR perfumes, Golconda and Diamond Water and a Prada exclusive, not to mention Comme des Garçons Series 2 Red: Carnation. Hurwitz’s eau de parfum rests with some very fine company, indeed.

Hurwitz, whose Parfums des Beaux Art label hails from none other than Boulder, CO, is a perfumer whose tastes run to the classical but not the unadventurous. As Chandler Burr noted in a recent review, “It is, oddly, in the abstracts [Viridian, Quinacridone Violet, Celadon] that Spencer Hurwitz goes from good to much better.” Having tested several other of her soliflores, I would have to agree; but Oeillets Rouges, not a new scent of hers by any means, approaches abstraction in its stunning approximation of red. She should have named it Technicolor Red. It pops and sputters and sparks with pepper and spice and myrrh, then pirouettes to a rest like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes.

Contra the maximalist approach of niche perfumer Neil Morris, whose recent perfume for the Japanese department store Takashimaya could stun a New York subway car into submission, the perfumes of Dawn Spencer Hurwitz betray a quiet American charm, and occasion in this reviewer the realization that, west of the Mississippi, still waters still do run deep.

Image credit: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square (Red), 1968. Norton-Simon Collection, Pasadena

Just Right

A perfume can be very good but, with few exceptions, the drydown – a fragrance’s second skin – is what assigns it its place in history or consigns it to oblivion. Tacky sports car-driving fortysomethings notwithstanding, very few of us splash on fragrance seconds before meeting a special someone for dinner. (In fact, for me, the very presence of a bottle of cologne in the beverage-holder of a car is a burning sign to cut my losses and clear out immediately.) A good perfume or cologne introduces itself as a living memory, not a mask placed frantically over a less presentable facade.

Of late, I have been admiring two truly stellar, lighter-bodied unisex fragrances: perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain’s Coriolan (1998; now re-christened and reformulated as L’Ame d’un Héros, 2008) and perfumer Françoise Caron’s Eau Fugace for Astier de Villatte (2008), each is an exemplar of perfection in the drydown.



Unlike the “head” and “heart” of a fragrance, the drydown is that phase of its evolution which best shows off its pedigree. A great drydown can never come from using shoddy, third-rate materials. For Coriolan, the drydown is a brief poème chypré of oakmoss, patchouli and helichrysum (otherwise known as everlasting flower); for Eau Fugace, its a takeoff on traditional eau de cologne but with written for Romantic strings, mainly petitgrain, basil, thyme and patchouli. One is cool, one warm.

Neither Coriolan nor Eau Fugace is reinventing the wheel. These certainly aren’t scents for the treasury, but there is a quiet, limpid, just-right sort of elegance about them that should land them a place in any man’s (or woman’s) life.

In this Light of Mars: Noir Epices (2000)

At some point early in this decade, before oriental became subsumed under oriental-woody – before, that is, the middle-finger of perfumery was lopped off – Michel Roudnitska created Noir Epices for Frédéric Malle’s Edition de Parfums. It was one of the series’ inaugural perfumes, and remains sans doute one of its best. While it is neither the shoulder-pad-clad career-bitch perfume that Opium and Cinnabar are, nor the opoponax and vanilla confection that Shalimar is, nor even the date-lipped arabesque of Serge Lutens’ Arabie, it is oriental through and through.

Luca Turin speaks to its medicinal character, a view which, on account of clove, I won’t discount; but Noir Epices is something more than a clove-studded pomander of orange and rose. For me, it is an abstraction of cinnamon – and a non-Lutens’style abstraction at that. It grows, I believe, from a moody cinnamon that eschews all that happy-homemaker/pie-in-the-oven suburban bunkum. It is the sort of cinnamon that would feel at home (indeed!) in a scene from Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or a Genet television play. Sad, but with an abiding sense of the nourishing absurd.

It is a disorienting scent, one that leads you out into a barren desert place and then confronts you, like a woman approaching out of nowhere with a book which, when opened, cannot be read. You turn the page and hear a child’s voice (orange blossom), next the voice of its mother (geranium absolute). It seems then that the sun has been replaced behind your back. Instead of slanting light, there is a strange neon intensity (nutmeg) and the nagging feeling that (that) nothing (sandalwood) that ever pleases you is just nice.

Infini de Caron (1970)

For the past four months I have grappled with writing a review of Caron Infini. Not that I’m turned off by this once-venerable house, like most are. (Yes, like everything, things have changed; thus, I keep my expectations low.) Probably it has more to do with coming to terms with a perfume of my mother’s generation – one that represents not revolutionary fervor but upper-middle-class entrenchment – and finding its restraint unexpectedly beguiling.


Back in pre-World War I Paris, Ernest Daltroff had created a perfume called [L’]Infini [Souvenance], which few have ever smelled, but the version known today was created in 1970 by Gerard Lefort, the perfumer responsible for Caron’s swansong Nocturnes in 1981. According to Richard Fraysse, Caron’s current nose, “[Infini] needed a lot of research to reach the perfect harmony between the “green” start, the aldehyde floral heart, and the wooded base.” Making matters even more complicated, the Caron website makes a distinction between Infini “the perfume,” apparently only available now in EDT concentration (1.7 ounce atomizer bottle) and L’Infini (note the definite article), “an extremely concentrated version of this perfume” in the original Serge Mansau assymetrical geometric flacon (∞), which was released in 2000 in order to “give women the pleasure of needing only a touch of perfume to create an infinite vapor trail.” (If you like Sir Denys Lasdun’s Royal National Theatre complex and Stanley Kubrick set design, you’ll like the parfum bottle. It’s super cool in a super-wonky sort of way.)


Despite its being a skin-scent after about 20 minutes, Infini in the EDT concentration is perhaps a better representation of the 1970 formula, which I have only been able to confirm was made in extrait, EDC, PDT and EDT. According to Jean-Yves Gaborit in his book Parfum: Prestige et Haute Couture (Fribourg, 1985), the formula contains Grasse and Bulgarian rose, jonquil, lily of the valley, iris, peach, plum, vetiver, sandalwood and civet. (No doubt, minus the civet since Alès Group took over Caron in 1988.) The Caron Web site mentions only tuberose, jonquil, sandalwood, vetiver and lily of the valley.


To my nose, there isn’t a tuberose to be found for miles. Instead, what I get is a very pleasant – and short-lived – rose accord followed by a sustained white floral aldehydic of the squeaky clean, soapy variety which would reach its full realization in Sofja Grosjman’s White Linen for Estée Lauder in 1978. On those attributes alone, I’d take White Linen any day, but Lafort’s skill here is apparent in a space-age green metallic note that half-reminds me of the smell that Reynold’s Wrap tin foil gave off when I was a kid and, more recently, a herbal metallic facet of the green opening notes of Creed Original Chèvrefeuille.

With a genealogy so long and confusing, I begin to wonder whether Infini weren’t some elaborate pun for a fragrance that will be reinvented for ∞.