Liaisons Dangereuses and Wise Advice: Tempted by Roses at the By Kilian counter

Kudos to Kilian Hennessy. I may have been initially annoyed by the bombastic prose on his website (it has since been removed), and by the beautiful but costly packaging (he has since made purse atomizers and refills available without purchasing the fancy presentation), but I’ll say one thing for him: he knows how to pick the people he works with. Offering the gifted Calice Becker the opportunity of playing with lavish materials was a welcome move. And, at least in Paris, the people he’s put in charge of his counters are genuine connoisseurs. And none more so than Rebecca Veuillet-Gallot, whom some of you may have met in the Parfums de Nicolaï shop near Le Bon Marché, where the author of Le Guide du Parfum officiated, and who can now be found in the Scent Room of Le Printemps in Paris.

I’d say Rebecca’s the type of sales associate every brand should try to attract, if she wasn’t one of a kind. She’s clearly enthusiastic about the By Kilian line and has thought out each scent, as well as the whole of the collection, in such a way that she can adjust her pitch to the type of customer she’s dealing with. Me, for instance. The woman who comes in to sniff, chat, and practically never buys. Rebecca had pretty much already managed to turn me on to Beyond Love even before she worked for Kilian – but then, I’ve always been a pushover from tuberose – just by wearing it in my presence (I recognized its sillage instantly, and that’s saying something for the scent rather than the keenness of my nose). This time, just as I was preparing to skin-test something else, I caught a whiff of something rounded, jammy and quite wonderful emanating from her general direction.

“Why don’t you test this one instead?” she purred. She didn’t really have to insist: I was generously squirted in the chest, neck and arms with Liaisons Dangereuses.

The scent is sold as a Damascus plum but both Rebecca and I agreed it was much more of a jammy rose, leaning both towards Nahéma though in a darker, less ample tone, and the original Femme with its lactonic, coconut-plum-peach facets, sprinkle of cinnamon and mossy vetiver base. There is also a plum-rose-chypre ghost of Parure hovering around…

Rebecca said she envisioned it as the most delicate of rose confitures, complete with the green sepals of the blossoms (the gritty green touch of cassis bud) and bubbles of air trapped inside – though Calice Becker works with rich materials, she does manage to inject a very contemporary ease, a breathing space between the notes.

Though spraying on a plummy, winey, jammy rose in the midst of the season’s first heat wave sounded like a passport to migraine, it sat well on my skin, the lactonic facets welding generously with my flesh.

I am happy to say that Liaisons Dangereuses has now made it to my wish list, something I didn’t much expect a rose fragrance to do. I’m going to have to watch my step with Rebecca – that’s some serious voodoo she’s working…

On to you: who’s the best perfume S.A. you ever ran into, and how did he/she work his/her voodoo on you?

Picture by Sophia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello

Liaisons Dangereuses et conseils avisés: la tentation de la rose chez By Kilian

Kilian Hennessy doit être félicité. J’ai d’abord été énervée sur les bords par la prose trop ampoulée de son site (retirée depuis), et par un packaging certes très beau, mais dont je me serais volontiers passée (il propose désormais atomiseurs de sac et recharges sans qu’il soit obligatoire d’acheter le conditionnement de luxe), mais je suis épatée par la qualité des gens dont il s’entoure. Offrir à la brillante Calice Becker l’occasion de s’exprimer dans des matières riches : bien vu. Recruter, en tous cas en ce qui concerne ses comptoirs parisiens, de véritables connaisseurs, des passionnés : bien vu encore. Surtout en ce qui concerne sa dernière recrue, Rebecca Veuillet-Gallot, que plusieurs d’entre vous auront déjà rencontrée dans la boutique des Parfums de Nicolaï de la rue de Grenelle, où l’auteur du Guide du Parfum a longtemps officié, et que vous pouvez désormais retrouver dans la Scent Room du Printemps à Paris.

J’aurais dit que Rebecca était le genre d’ambassadrice que toute marque devrait chercher à recruter, si elle n’était pas unique en son genre. Elle est sincèrement enthousiasmée par les parfums de Kilian ; elle les a réfléchis individuellement et dans leur cohérence de marque, de façon à pouvoir ajuster son discours selon le type de client auquel elle a affaire. Moi, par exemple. La gonzesse qui vient sentir, discuter, mais pratiquement jamais acheter. Rebecca avait déjà réussi à me brancher sur Beyond Love avant même de travailler chez Kilian, simplement en le portant en ma présence (ce qui en dit plus long sur la qualité du parfum que l’acuité de mon nez). Cette fois, alors que j’étais sur le point de tester sur peau un autre parfum, j’ai capté un sillage arrondi, confituré et appétissant émanant de sa direction.

« Pourquoi n’essaies-tu pas plutôt celui-là ? », a-t-elle roucoulé. Elle n’a pas vraiment dû insister : je tendais déjà le cou, les bras et la poitrine, ce qui fait que je me suis laissée généreusement asperger de Liaisons Dangereuses.

Le parfum est désigné comme une prune de Damas mais Rebecca et moi sommes d’accord : c’est une confiture de rose qui penche à la fois vers Nahéma, en plus sombre et moins expansif, et vers le Femme original avec ses facettes lactoniques coco-prune-pêche, sa pincée de cannelle et sa base mousse-vétiver. Sans oublier que cet accord prune-rose-mousse laisse trainer quelques relents de Parure…

Rebecca m’a dit qu’elle voyait Liaisons Dangereuses comme une confiture de roses raffinée dans laquelle se seraient glissés des sépales (la touche verte crissante de cassis bourgeons) et des bulles d’air – bien que Calice Becker travaille sur des matériaux opulents, il est vrai que ses compositions pour By Kilian ont une souplesse et une respiration contemporaines.

S’inonder d’un chypre rose-prune pourrait sembler contre-indiqué alors que Paris entre dans sa première canicule, mais grâce à ses facettes lactoniques, il s’est marié en douceur à ma peau.

Je dois avouer que désormais, Liaisons Dangereuses a rejoint la liste des choses qui pourraient rejoindre ma collection, ce à quoi je ne m’attendais pas trop, moi qui ne suis pas tellement éprise des roses (mais de Nahéma, si). Je vais devoir prendre garde à Rebecca : à ce stade, c’est presque du vaudou !

Et maintenant, à vous : quel est le vendeur, la vendeuse, le/la responsable de boutique de parfums qui a su le mieux vous envoûter ? Et comment s’y est-on pris ?

Photo de Sofia Sanchez et Mauro Mongiello

Enchanted, disenchanted...

The industry people I’ve been talking to in France – perfumers, consultants, sales assistants – seem to be somewhat crestfallen of late. Too many launches, too much dreck; brands ripping each other off and counting on the consumers’ ignorance to pass their stuff as “NEW!” and “ORIGINAL!” ; perfumers pushed to the forefront as the latest marketing ploy rather than as a real move towards authorship.

The dream is gone, they say when they’re in a dark mood. We’re just going through the motions, feeding the machine. When’s the last time you were truly blown away? they ask. Do you ever feel really moved by a new fragrance nowadays?

Actually, I have been moved and excited quite a few times over the past year: that’s the stuff I write about, mostly – the story the perfume tells in smells a springboard for a story in words.

But I’m finding it more and more difficult to stray from “my” authors: the people I can trust to come up with compositions that give me sensuous pleasure and appeal to my intellect; that bear the distinct imprint of their style and bear witness to their constant evolution. When I stick my nose into a genuinely good piece of work, trying to come up with something insightful to say is just as much of a thrill as the sheer sensuous pleasure of wearing it, of letting myself be seduced and surprised by it. And then, I believe it’s still possible.

Otherwise… It’s bad enough not to be able to wear the stuff I love as much as I would were I not blogging. I’m finding that more and more, I can’t be bothered with the rest. Life’s too short to wear mediocre stuff just to write about it. And there’s just too much of it.

I’m also starting to find that the online perfume landscape has changed: the sheer volume of discourse seems to have increased exponentially of late -- not a week goes by without my finding out about a new blog. I’m not begrudging fellow perfume lovers their pleasure in writing about their passion, far from it – writing about perfume is both a way of fine-tuning one’s appreciation and of generating community, and new voices are always interesting. But clearly, the perfumed blogosphere is metastasizing like crazy, with the attendant risk of draining away the members of the community who could write insightful comments on other blogs or in forums – why repeat what you’ve already written about at length on your own turf? I’m not complaining: I find the level of the comments I get very high, and I’m gratified to have set up a space for the type of discussion that takes place here.

To sum up, though I’ll certainly be back with new reviews very shortly, I’m feeling the glut.

Meanwhile, I put these questions to you:

When was the last time you were enchanted by a perfume, and which one(s)?

Are you starting to suffer from launch fatigue?

And are you restricting the number of houses/perfumers you follow as a result?

Do you feel moved to seek out new voices online? Or is it all just too much to keep up with?

Illustration: Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's The Little Soldier (1963)

Enchantée, désenchantée...

Ces derniers temps, je perçois une certaine lassitude chez mes interlocuteurs, qu’ils soient parfumeurs, consultants ou vendeurs. Trop de lancements, trop de médiocrité, trop de plagiats. Trop de tout, pas assez de création. Même la nouvelle mode qui consiste à mettre en avant les parfumeurs relève beaucoup plus de la stratégie marketing que d’un réel désir de faire confiance aux auteurs.

Le rêve est mort, entends-je. On ne fait que nourrir la machine. Quand as-tu été vraiment émue par un nouveau parfum pour la dernière fois ? me demande-t-on.

Émue, je l’ai été à plusieurs reprises au cours de l’année écoulée : en général, c’est sur ces parfums-là que je préfère écrire – l’histoire que raconte le parfum en odeurs servant de matrice à une histoire racontée en mots. Mais j’ai de plus en plus de mal à m’écarter de « mes » auteurs : les parfumeurs auxquels je fais confiance, ceux dont les compositions me procureront des plaisirs à la fois sensuels et intellectuels ; qui ont un véritable style, et dont le style évolue. Quand je plonge le nez dans l’une de leurs créations, trouver les mots pour la cerner est aussi excitant que de la porter, de me laisser séduire ou dépayser. Et là, la parfumerie, j’y crois.

Autrement… c’est déjà bien assez de ne pas pouvoir porter ce que j’aime autant que je le ferais si je n’écrivais pas ce blog. De plus en plus, je constate que le reste ne mérite pas mon temps. La vie est trop courte pour porter des trucs médiocres simplement pour les écharper. D’ailleurs, on n’y suffirait pas même en s’y mettant à plein temps : il y en a trop.

Je constate aussi que le paysage de la blogosphère parfumée a beaucoup changé dernièrement plutôt d’ailleurs du côté anglophone : le volume de discours s’est accru de façon exponentielle, et il ne se passe pas de semaine sans que je découvre un nouveau blog, un nouveau site. Loin de moi l’idée de reprocher aux amoureux du parfum de vouloir exprimer leur passion – c’est la meilleure façon d’affûter son appréciation de l’art et de générer de la communauté, et les nouvelles voix sont toujours précieuses. Mais manifestement, la blogosphère parfumée est en pleine métastase, avec le risque qui en découle, d’appauvrir les échanges sur les blogs et forums existants puisque les auteurs de commentaires qui bloguent eux-mêmes n’ont pas forcément envie de répéter ailleurs des propos qu’ils ont développés « chez eux ». Je ne me plains pas : le niveau des commentaires que je reçois ici est très élevé, et je suis fière d’avoir créé un espace qui permette de telles discussions.

Il n’empêche : brusquement, on étouffe, et les cinéphiles parmi vous qui auront reconnu la scène dont est extraite l’illustration ci-dessus devineront la question que je me pose parfois…

Quoi qu’il en soit, à vous de répondre à celles-ci, si ça vous chante :

Quand avez-vous été enchanté(e) par un nouveau parfum pour la dernière fois ? Et le, ou lesquels ?

Éprouvez-vous un sentiment de sursaturation par rapport à toutes les nouveautés?

Restreignez-vous le nombre de maisons ou de parfumeurs que vous suivez ?

Éprouvez-vous le besoin de rechercher de nouvelles voix sur internet ? Ou vous sentez-vous dépassé(e) ?

Comme des Garçons Wonderwood: In which sight trumps smell

So what’s the deal with Comme des Garçons?

Most of their projects are now co-branded: the edginess of Rei Kawakubo’s house (which could, after 40 years in existence, be labelled a legacy player of the avant-garde) rubbing off on, and getting a fresh injection of energy from, other edgy players. A lifestyle magazine, Monocle. A Finnish design house, Artek. A designer/socialite/heiress, Daphne Guinness. A mad hatter, Stephen Jones. A cult Japanese fashion house, Undercover. Und so weiter.

Perhaps co-branding is a way for CdG Parfums’ artistic director Christian Astuguevieille to harness new creative forces. After all, the man has been driving the most iconoclastic and fearless perfume house in history for over 15 years. He is the one who introduced the notion of ugliness in perfume, just as CdG designer Rei Kawakubo did in fashion: or rather, he pushed back the idea of beauty by displaying non-noble smells, whether synthetic (photocopier, skai, nail polish), mundane (sticky cake, peppermint, harissa) or ambient (church incense, Alep soap) within the context of fine fragrance. Astuguevieille, an artist himself, inaugurated the idea of odeurs trouvées, just as artists had been lifting found objects from everyday life and displaying them in a “noble” context, in order to disrupt both our perception of those objects and the context (a gallery, a museum, the very idea of fine art) ever since Marcel Duchamp upended a urinal, signed it “R. Mutt” and called it “Fountain”. Fine fragrance being the context, “weird” notes being the shocker.

Astuguevieille’s concepts have been both pioneering and restricted, for the most part, to his own oeuvre – CdG, throughout collaborative work with people like Mark Buxton, Yann Vasnier, Bertrand Duchaufour, Antoine Lie, etc., can truly be said to be his brainchild – at least as far as his most overtly avant-garde concepts go. État Libre d’Orange and CB I Hate Perfume are probably the only houses that took the beautiful-ugly, noble-mundane idea and ran away with it. On the other hand, a lot of the ideas developed for CdG, notably the treatment of woody, spicy and incense notes, have trickled down into the mainstream.

It is perhaps in the order of things that once a house has established a language, however revolutionary at the outset, that language ends up stuttering, and being drowned out by the din of newer, noisier stuff (Serge Lutens being another case in point).

Is that why I am suffering from CdG fatigue? Truth be told, I did find the Undercover pair, Holygrace and Holygrapie, truly disquieting, their sweetish notes echoing the creepiness of the giant plush Cyclops assembled by Undercover designer Jun Takahashi. The scents matched the visuals perfectly, exposing the latent evil in kitsch – in this case, the Japanese idea of “cute”, expertly massacred by Takahashi.

But when I got a sample of the newest CdG, Wonderwood, I thought ok, well, woods. Or, as the press release states, “A positive overdose of woods, woody notes and synthetic wood constructions (Wood gone mad).” The list of notes does read like an international forestry convention: oud, vetiver, cedar, gaiac, cypress, patchouli, sandalwood… The end result? Well, pretty much what it says on the bottle, with an extraordinarily sticky synthetic sandalwood (24 hours on skin and counting) gradually taking over from a metallic vetiver and quite a lot of Cashmeran.

But somehow it seems that in the launch of Wonderwood, the scent is not the real point. In fact I get the feeling it was more of a springboard for the creative excitement generated by the Quay Brothers’ Wonderwood video, which has been linked all over the web and can be downloaded from the dedicated site. “Someone who loved woods more than any words could say” is an eerily beautiful plunge into the textures, hues and whorls of wood, and certainly one of the best visual essays on a perfume ever filmed.

Perhaps its very eloquence (“more than any words could say”) short-circuits the need for a review. Perhaps that’s where the creative juices flowed. After all, a fragrance launch isn’t only about the fragrance itself: there’s the campaign and the packaging, both of which usually cost a lot more than the actual smelly stuff. Perhaps that’s what is being put on display here, just as it was in Jun Takahashi’s Undercover Holygrace video.

The visual always trumps the olfactory.

Illustration: Ou by Philippe Mayaux.