Le Labo Santal 33

Le Labo Santal 33 is the Giorgio Beverly Hills of the 2010s in terms of its faceless ubiquity, exorbitant price, and California snob gaucherie, except that Giorgio Beverly Hills is actually good. Santal 33 is present in toiletry form in all the trendy boutique hotels. It is a staple of the millionaire fauxhemian celebrity class who masquerade as countercultural 1960s vagabonds. There are style pieces in the New York Times about it. Hipsters will claim that they wore it before everyone else did as though this gives them some kind of street cred. People who wear it will say that they didn't care for perfume or cologne before their senses were awakened by Santal 33, and they will coo over it like it is the first non-calone non-fruity-floral they have ever smelled,  which it probably is. 

In terms of its actual smell, it is a synthetic Xeroxed sandalwood-fig idea. The original Marc Jacobs for men smells similar, and is stronger, and cheaper. There's nothing really wrong with Santal 33, and it's positive that average Americans, the type that normally have a puritanical class-based fear of fragrance, get excited about a smell and feel emboldened enough to wear it in 2017. Why, though, does it have to be this one? Every time I hear someone express excitement about Santal 33 I want to take them on a personal tour of perfume history and show them all the weird, bold masterpieces that people used to wear and which used to be commonplace until the 1990s.
Santal 33's immense popularity can be traced to its au courant absence of gender and sex appeal, in a decade defined by identity politics gone mad and the proliferation of deceitful pseudo-religious gender theory. It doesn't seem intended for men or women, but for genderless pastel-haired consumers with customizable Mr. Potato Head body modifications, vaguely Bohemian self-images, and $300 to burn. Its smoky-woodsy theme appeals to hipster women who think of themselves as above wearing anything overtly girly, yet it does not have any kind of conventionally masculine hairy-chest fougere signifiers that will give Tumblr Millennials unpleasant reminders of grandfathers or patriarchy. It is ideal for male feminist industry bots attending SXSW conferences on "diversity in tech." 

Highland Mall

On Christmas of 2009, my parents surprised me with the news that they'd rented a midcentury dream house in the Austin neighborhood of Crestview. I was twenty-three, still lived with them, and was about to transfer from Austin Community College to Texas State University to complete my long-in-the-making English degree. I worked part-time at Freebirds, a hippie-themed burrito restaurant in north Austin. We lived in a mobile home out in the country in Granger, a forty-five-minute drive from my ACC classes and job. At the time I had no problem with my long commutes, and would listen to Fleetwood Mac CDs start to finish while smoking Winston Light 100s. 

I was planning on moving to Austin proper with a friend in the coming year so I'd be closer to Texas State. My parents said they were renting the house in Crestview in order for my dad to be closer to his work, but the truth is that they were doing it for me. They wanted me to have a cool place to live so that I'd be able to finish school without worrying about rent. It should be said that I love my parents more than I love anyone on earth, I am the youngest child, and they have always spoiled me rotten. I didn't realize until I'd moved out on my own and they'd moved back to Granger that those years at the Crestview house, 2010 through 2013 plus one year they lived there without me, were the best years of my life. They were also the years where my perfume hobby was at its most decadent and excessive, so my memories are woven through the dozens and dozens of gorgeous scents I bought and wore during that time.

Highland Mall was the first indoor mall in Austin and at the time we moved to Crestview it was on its last legs as an active shopping center.  It became notorious for the crime and violence that took place during the Texas Relays and white people always avoided going there and talked about it in ominous tones. It had one remaining anchor store, a Macy's, but most of its open retail space was occupied by ghetto fashion stores, Army recruitment offices, and that jewel of the ghost mall, the discount perfume store run by Middle Easterners or Eastern Europeans and filled to bursting with dusty bottles of rare and exciting perfumes. There were three, maybe four of these stores, all with regal names--Perfume King, Perfume Palace--and they were my lifeblood. These were the first places I actually saw bottles of the legendary perfumes I read about in Luca Turin's book. Here, off the top of my head, are just some of the things I bought at these stores during those years: 

-Montana Parfum de Peau
-Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant
-Balenciaga Rumba
-Vivienne Westwood Boudoir
-YSL Rive Gauche
-Balenciaga Pour Homme
-Ungaro III
-Cacharel Noa

-Cacharel Eden
-Cacharel Loulou
-Caron Yatagan
-Paco Rabanne Calandre
-Paco Rabanne Metal
-YSL Kouros
-YSL Rive Gauche
-YSL Paris

-YSL Opium

-Cassini

-Coriandre

In addition to housing the bus stop where my mom dropped me off to catch the commuter bus to school every morning, Highland was a thirty-minute walk from my house and I'd go there more or less every day and buy something new, always without having smelled it. I was rarely, if ever, disappointed with the little bottles that contained distant eras and exotic locales. That's what perfume became for me after I got into it--little vessels to past time periods and distant locations I couldn't possibly ever visit. Like Serge Lutens is always trying to recreate his absent mother through his perfumes, I am always trying to recreate through scent specific places and sensations I have sketchy but intense memories of as a child. Women were these Amazons with shoulder pads and warrior makeup and narcotic, overwhelming perfumes, and everywhere smelled of cigarettes. That is the smell I want; that is the place I want to be. 

When I opened my first blue box of Montana and could smell its dank, urinous patchouli wafting through the cardboard, I was transported to Highland Mall twenty years prior. I could be the woman who wore that, who picked up that helix bottle at the mall, who smoked carelessly, who got a perm at Visible Changes. It wouldn't be "weird" to wear this either. Everyone else wore similar things. 

Over the years I gave away or sold many of those bottles. I was concerned with not looking like a hoarder and tried to emulate my friend Monica, who was constantly getting rid of things she'd purchased and making her spaces look austere and immaculate. As I near thirty, I realize that I am a person who needs to own libraries of things. I'm a Cancer, which explains both the obsessive nostalgia and the filling of my house with emotionally significant objects. 

These days I find myself buying up pretty much everything I had during that time, and the memories are so vivid--seemingly inconsequential moments that I shouldn't remember but do, like my dad, who rarely said anything about my scents, driving me to Office Max while I was drenched in Rumba, and him remarking on how good it smelled. Me wearing too much Lolita Lempicka as I grilled meat in a hot food trailer during the summer and swearing it off forever (I love it now and bought a new bottle). Me wafting Eden while fucking some stranger in Midtown Spa and promptly throwing the bottle in the trash in revulsion. Me leaving my Poison-redolent pea coat at a Craigslist hookup's meth den and working up the courage to go back and get it--yes, these were the Craigslist dark ages right before gay hookup apps made Internet sex into a virtual candy shop. It's strange to think that it's late enough in the decade that "early 2010s Austin" is now a specific time period of the city completely different from what it is now. Everything that was still old and interesting when I lived there is either gone  forever or, worse, exists in skeleton form as a new-and-improved expensive hipster version of itself, as happened to LaLa's Little Nugget and Poodle Dog Lounge. Midtown Spa is gone. Chain Drive is gone. Bout Time is gone. The Crestview Minimax is gone. You wouldn't believe if you went to Burnet Road now, just a few years later, that I found a full 60s bottle of Schiaparelli Shocking at the Austin Antique Mall and wore the shit out of it. 

I have a beautiful memory of walking through Highland Mall the last Christmas it still had an anchor store with my mom, dad, and sister, stopping to smell all of the old Estee Lauder masterpieces, and coming home with a bottle of Kenzo Jungle from one of the discounters. The education that mall gave me in its dying years will stick with me my whole life.

Francis Kurkdjian Absolue Pour Le Soir

I think this smells terrific and have worn it many times over the years, but I must say that whenever I do there follow a mysterious number of comments from those around me about unclean ambient odors. They never refer directly to my fragrance, so it could, I suppose, be paranoia. Still, it's unnerving. Once I slept on a friend's couch and the next day received weird texts (not mentioning me or my fragrance) about a bad smell in the living room. Another time my friend commented that "the girl next to him at the movie smelled really bad." I've gotten forthright compliments, like "you smell like ice cream" and "you smell like incense." To me, it smells like incense, wood, roses, and honey, with the suggestion of urine only at the beginning. 
Why do any of us even bother wearing fragrance? No one anymore gets the message you think you're sending; they just panic at any smell that is not recognizably Bath and Body Works or Iso E Super. You're drifting off in a sensory fantasy world with a piece of art you probably spent a lot of money on and some reptile-brained operative of the New World Order will soil it forever with a comment you'll never forget. My advice to budding perfumistas is to go into this hobby with the assumption that the entire world would prefer you wear nothing at all, and not to expect any sort of positive feedback from anyone. What a state of affairs.

Promise me anything but give me Angel

Angel is simply the best. I have tried in my near-decade of perfume hobbyism basically everything worth trying, and I truly only care about this. Eight years since my first bottle, I still actually get *excited* to spray it on multiple times every day, and its self-contained advertising universe of blue glaciers, snow queens, and infinite space keeps me hooked as though I'm reading a novel. There's no need to worry about reformulations or vintages, just buy a new one. It's still as great as ever, and each bottle I've had smells slightly different but totally itself. I get compliments on it every day from both men and women and my boss encourages me to wear it, for those who buy into the ubiquitous online negativity about it. How anyone with a soul could not be moved by this blue elixir is beyond me. It is the best perfume ever, and it is also heady intellectual art.

Robert Piguet Bandit

One word comes to mind when I smell Bandit--rude. There is something so insouciant, contrary, and mean about it that makes it one of the great shockers of perfume history. It is considered a leather but it doesn't smell like leather; it smells like a fistful of burning weeds. Despite its age and French pedigree it is vulgar and trashy, something underscored by its tumultuous licensing history. I believe it became something of a hippie cult hit in the 1970s, evidenced by its presence in Jean Eustache's masterpiece The Mother and the Whore. In the film, Jean-Pierre Leaud and Bernadette Lafont have a dreary open shack-up relationship. When Lafont leaves on a trip, Leaud begins a courtship with a nihilistic, promiscuous hippie nurse played by Francoise LeBrun, who leaves the apartment reeking of Bandit. When Lafont returns she seems more annoyed by the stench of Bandit than the affair. In this context, Bandit does smell like 1970s malaise and regret; the full ashtray the morning after, two abortions later. It would be strange to smell this on someone who didn't have "a past," so to speak.
The received wisdom is that it was in bad form until the late-90s restoration, but my first bottle was a 90s extrait that smelled divine, and all 80s-90s bottles I have experienced smelled without a doubt like Bandit. Because it is a green fragrance, "vintage" hunting is useless, and I have purchased post-90s bottles that were new and boxed and had turned into a powdery nail polish mess. I don't see the extrait listed on Piguet's website anymore so I hope it was not discontinued.
I don't think it smells like Knize or Aramis or Azuree or Cuir de Russie. It smells like a bad woman--fitting, since it was a perfume made by a lesbian for a homosexual designer at a time when those identities relegated one to the criminal underworld.

Claude Montana Parfum de Peau

Certainly in my top ten of all time, if not top five, Montana is a landmark in avant-garde 1980s perfumery that still exists in excellent, faithful form after IFRA regulations. This is one of the weird animalic 80s rose chypres that modern American noses would turn from in confusion and horror. There are others like it--Paloma, Animale--but there is something so distinctive in Montana's blinding neon green glow that reminds me of nothing else. Montana and Mugler were the kings of ruthless, fascist-inspired, unwearable 80s leather couture, yet Mugler did not put out a scent until 1992. In Montana one sees what a Mugler scent produced during his heyday might have been like. In fact, Alien's streamlined neon jasmine accord reminds me somewhat of Montana.
As for what it actually smells like, it is a giant electric rose surrounded by pepper, sour greens, sour fruit, and a salty,garbagey, urinous castoreum leather accord. From what I understand, Montana's popularity in the Middle East contributed to the development of the now-popular damasceone rose-oud accord; in a way, this predicted the Montales of the present day 20 years ahead of time. It smells exotic and Arabian, neither male nor female. Others will probably not encourage you to wear it, but that's beside the point. This is not a perfume that wants to be pretty. 
A bottle of it can be seen on Catherine Tramell's boudoir in Basic Instinct. That says it all, as far as what type of woman would wear this. 
Ignore reformulation talk of this one. I have had many bottles from all eras and think it is remarkably consistent. A fragrance this dirty needs its fresh green top notes and some of my older ones did not smell quite right. The bottle remains gorgeous and unchanged. A perfume this good warrants paying full retail price if necessary. For lovers of Yatagan, Magie Noire, Amouage, and the 80s in general.

Insults

Anyone with a perfume habit in America in the twenty-first century knows that awful people will reduce every complex, stunning, fascinating work of art to "baby powder" and "old lady" every day of your life. Here are just a few of the comments I've gotten over the years.

Youth-Dew: "Old lady" "Baby powder" "It smells like incense in here"

Amouage Gold Man: "It smells like baby powder and diapers" "It smells like incense"

Anything with patchouli: "Who's wearing patchouli?" in furious tone

Poison: "Glade" "Old lady"

Aromatics Elixir: "It smells like bug spray" "Someone smells like weed" "Barbecue sauce"

Patou 1000: "Something smells horrible in here. Like baby shit."

Magie Noire: "What is that hamster cage smell?"

Yatagan: "Someone smells like weed"

Carnal Flower: young father furiously insisting his baby has pooped her diaper while wife insists she has not

Habanita: Baby powder

Rive Gauche: Baby powder, old lady

Une Rose: "Barbecue sauce"

Secretions Magnifiques: "You smell so good, like sandalwood!"

Joy: "It smells like a perfume counter in here"

Aramis: Baby powder

Comme des Garcons: Yankee Candle, Christmas potpourri

Le Labo Oud 27: Old lady

Paco Rabanne La Nuit: coworker insisting there was animal poop in the room

Angel: grandma, old lady

all Santa Maria Novellas: "WHAT is that SMELL?" in furious tone

Enchanted Forest by The Vagabond Prince

I won an Editor's Choice Award at Fragrantica! This is the first time in awhile anything has come of my perfume writing. They kindly sent me a bottle of Enchanted Forest.

My first thought on spraying Enchanted Forest was that it smells like Enya. Winter Enya, specifically the "On My Way Home" video where she is Anna Karen-Enya on a snowbound train wrapped in white furs and turban, reliving sepia-toned holiday memories of pine forests and paper lantern Christmas ornaments. Enya is one of my favorite pop artists ever, so the fact that Enchanted Forest conjured the Enya world so effortlessly and effectively pleased me immensely.
There is a wonderfully dirty castoreum-pine effect at the beginning that is like Yatagan. The rest of the perfume is built on a contrast of sour blackcurrant, my favorite perfume fruit, and misty, bitter pine and moss effects. Something I find impressive is how it makes fruit and holiday trappings smell so staid and masculine.
I'd like if the woodsy elements were bolder--more patchouli, more castoreum, more grass--but this is a beautiful and unique perfume for those like me who enjoy bitter blackcurrant of the type found in Magie Noire and L'Ombre dans L'Eau, truly an Eau d'Enya.

Serge Lutens Borneo 1834

Borneo is designed for perfume bloggers with graduate degrees who need Angel repackaged for them and sold at three times the price in order to be freed of associations with loud, ditzy women they've known. The average gun-totin' Walmart-shoppin' blonde Jesus freak might stumble across Angel, but no, they'll never find out about Borneo, or be able to afford it. It smells great, but this sort of precious dainty snob phenomenon is what made me avoid Serge Lutens for years.

FRUIT DIET; or ANGEL Rewarded

FRUIT DIET;
or
ANGEL Rewarded

In a Series of
Familiar Internet Postings
from a
Handsome Young Man
to Fellow Perfumistas

The last seven months have been the first time I've not had Angel since I was introduced to it years ago. My partner became transfixed with it after I told him to smell it in the store; he found it revolting, then fascinating, then wanted some, over the course of several months. He said it smelled like the butt crack of a rich guy with good taste. I sprayed a bunch on from the tester and he said it smelled good on me, and that we had to get some.

Wait, what? Was I dreaming?

After six years of marinating myself in Angel against the wishes of everyone else in my life, I have found a man that actually *requests* that I wear it? Previous boyfriends were forced to tolerate it while quietly wishing I wore either nothing or some modern ISO-E thing so they could better project their drab fantasies of faceless, conformist liberal hipster blandness onto me without distraction. Angel was practically a third person in the relationship, and I insisted on wearing it out of artistic allegiance to it but also out of contempt for the expected dilution of personality in the homosexual hipster dating scene. When I took a seven-month break from it, it was something of a depressed resignation to conformity.

After the happy event I wasted no time in getting another bottle. My Angel situation is perhaps too symbolically perfect to be believable. I clung to my Angel in the face of adversity like Samuel Richardson's Pamela clings to her virtue. Like Pamela, I was rewarded in the end with a man who loves me for it.

Bogue Maai

Maai smells expensive and like something produced before allergen regulations. How the oakmoss and civet smell (are?) so real and are used in such quantities, I do not know. The problem to me is that it smells like an imitation of old fragrances rather than a new one. Perhaps I am too susceptible to marketing, image, and stories attached to perfume but wearing this is not nearly as pleasing as wearing actual La Nuit, Montana, Kouros or what have you. It feels incomplete. It has no history. ELDO Rien is a similar old-style opulent chypre but it is its own entity, and its cast of rubber and tar over aldehydic floral make it feel modern rather than a dogmatic imitation of the past. My first thought on smelling Maai was not that it was incredible, but that it smelled uncannily like Marilyn Miglin Pheromone or Charlie. Actually, my first thought was "Aviance Night Musk!" I have never smelled Aviance Night Musk, but Maai smelled like my mental image of Aviance Night Musk, if that makes any sense, something from 1980 that would've been advertised with an image of Dressed to Kill pantyhose legs in heels. It almost has a feminine bowling alley dowdiness to it. It feels bizarre to pay $300 for Marilyn Miglin Pheromone. In ten years if they still make this and all the real chypres are gone, we'll see how I feel. On another note, the perfumer himself, Antonio Gardoni, is very nice to look at. Perhaps if I smelled Maai emanating from his chest hair it would not make me think of Sally Struthers in Five Easy Pieces so much.

Estee Lauder Knowing

Knowing is one of the few fragrances I wear where straight men stop and ask what wonderful "cologne" I'm wearing. It is highly unusual for heterosexual men to stop a 6'4" male stranger and tell him he smells good, so it must really pique their curiosity. The current formula is more streamlined, bitter, and dry than before--fine with me--which causes it to edge more toward Bandit and perhaps more suitable for masculine wear. It's an intelligent scent that conveys a degree of sexiness while remaining nicely aloof. Additionally, it's one of the few remaining real French (though parodoxically American in origin) chypres still on department store shelves. Like Aromatics, it seems to have a devoted cult following and still sells well, as evidenced by the fact that Lauder didn't relegate it to the "House of Lauder" collection recently as it did all its other older scents. The original ad with Paulina Porizkova, arms crossed in a tuxedo, is one of my favorites. The fact that it's a ripoff of the Deneuve No. 5 ads from the 70s doesn't detract one bit. There aren't smart ads for smart perfumes for smart women in tuxedos anymore.

Perfume of Contempt: Dior Poison

Poison is a proto-Lutensian medicinal purple tuberose apothecary syrup, at once radiantly whorey and ascetically anti-food anti-joy anti-sex antisocial. I have come to prefer the current EDT to the old Esprit de Parfum because it is drier and gets to the resinous-sticky incense musk drydown a little faster. For me, sometimes nothing but Poison will do when I am feeling prickly, edgy, unapproachable. I am young enough not to have formed downmarket associations with Poison because of its popularity in the 80s, so it is more austere, medieval, cruel and anticipatory of Serge Lutens to me than it is shoulder pads and Dynasty. Some facet of the tuberose smells strongly of blood at the opening. A disturbing favorite.

Perfume of Contempt: Gucci Rush

Of course I love this. It's an 80s powerhouse throwback named after poppers that smells like poppers. Electric youth indeed!

Old man on bus, with tone that is not necessarily complimentary: "Excuse me. Whatever that is you have on..."

Me: "Oh, thank you! It's Gucci Rush."

Old man on bus, shaking head: "Whatever that is you have on..."


May it always be in production-- this is all Gucci still have going for them on the perfume end. Tom Ford's perfumes were so interesting before he started his pretentious eponymous line.

If you wear Rush, make sure to wear a lot. This is a statement scent that is meant to be big and opaque. Transmogrify into an electric red rectangle; the instructions are there in the bottle design. I am dismayed when I smell a stale little whisper of Rush, a stale little whisper of Alien, a stale little whisper of Angel, a stale little whisper of Coco Mlle, on women. Oh, what it will take to undo the damage that modern American beauty magazine editorials on the alleged proper way to wear fragrance have wrought--spray and walk through, one spray, others must only be able to smell you when they lean in close, all that prim 50s etiquette guide bullshit. Above all, don't listen to Goody Onespritz when she admonishes you that it is better to risk underapplying than to be "perfume lady" or "cologne guy."

"A woman who wears too little fragrance instead of too much has no future" -me

Jean Patou Colony

I bought some some of this years ago and didn't hold on to it long, though it did come packaged with a lovely silk scarf. It was a light old-style feminine leather (is "Patouaide" a thing?) overlaid with a metallic canned pineapple note-- nothing earth-shattering but historically interesting and perfect for 30s French ladies en vacances. The un-PC French colonial concept is delightful; very Marlene Dietrich "Hot Voodoo" or Josephine Baker banana dance. Colony serves in a pinch as a more affordable alternative to my sadly discontinued signature scent, Vigny Le Golliwogg.

Serge Lutens Rose de Nuit

As a lover of animalic rose chypres, I had high hopes for this; I was already fantasizing about it becoming my mysterious and elegant signature scent, how I would pretend it was Nombre Noir. While it is beautiful, it is simply too quiet to be worth its $300 price tag. Perhaps if I could purchase it in Paris where Lutens bell jars are about $150 I would spring for it, but the import cost is obscene.
The reputed strangeness of Rose de Nuit is dependent on the wearer never having smelled an 80s rose chypre. If you are familiar with Montana, Coriandre, La Perla, La Nuit, Magie Noire, Paloma Picasso, Aromatics Elixir, Knowing, Aramis 900, even Agent Provocateur, Rose de Nuit will seem like a disappointingly quiet and short-lived version of those with an admittedly gorgeous silky texture and top-notch raw materials. If you are not, it will probably blow your mind as rose chypre accords did when I first smelled them. It is an exotic odor often termed "old lady" but framed with cool Lutens opulence and exclusivity that make it palatable and mysterious. It's like how someone who has never seen a truly out-there inscrutable art movie (Andrei Rublev, Persona, Melancholie der Engel) would have their minds blown by, say, It Follows. Rose chypres are shocking to modern noses because millennials, having grown up with no fragrance except the occasional calone or Iso E, simply can't comprehend someone choosing to smell like that.

Still, if I make my way to Paris, I may buy a bottle. The prospect of dumping it on copiously from a bell jar is appealing.

Perfume of Contempt: Calvin Klein Eternity

When I was a child in the 90s, women all smelled like this--towering authority figures in denim vests with stiff pixies cuts a la Enya and Patty from My So-Called Life. If you were to go in any elementary school classroom in 1995, it would likely smell of Eternity. It instilled a kind of fear and respect in me even as it made me sick. It was fascinating and I miss women having this kind of presence; 2015 is all drab Soviet seriousness and scentless sourness and strident politics. Everyone has a castrated academic boyfriend/husband that prefers "the natural look" and hates perfume. If I smell perfume on a woman it's such a rare treat that no matter what it is, I love her. I love any woman wearing any fragrance that I can actually smell--that's how starved for it I am in liberal dystopian Austin.

Just thinking of Eternity makes my stomach drop. It's a sour green floral with a huge heap of cloves and a pre-calone aquatic overlay. If women at that time were not wearing this, they were wearing one of the other Grojsman blockbusters that had the same signature stomach-drop shock value. Here's a great quote about my idol, Camille Paglia, and Eternity from someone named Marnieworld on a forum that has nothing to do with perfume:

"My favorite Paglia memory has nothing to do with her teaching though. I have always had allergies and a bad sense of smell because of it. I mistakenly spilled a bit of perfume on my typing paper and handed in a paper to her right before Christmas break. When we returned I received my paper in a plastic bag. She said that she had to isolate all of the papers on her porch until she could determine which was the offending paper and it took her a few weeks to pinpoint me as the culprit. In addition to the comments about the writing she told me not to use so much perfume and compared me to Belle Watling of Gone With the Wind. Some students in another class that didn't like her, organized themselves to all wearing that perfume(Calvin Klein's Eternity) one cold day and it drove her absolutely insane. Not a far trip of course!"

Perfume of Contempt: Thierry Mugler Womanity

Five years after its release, I feel Womanity's time has come. When it came out, everyone was either underwhelmed that it wasn't as weird as the brief made it sound or thought it was fishy and repellent. I love the bizarre, humorous marketing and bottle that no one knew what to make of; in the 80s Mugler's (and Claude Montana's) designs were considered misogynous and unwearable, classic cases of homosexuals using the fashion industry to bind and enslave women, therefore it's a scream that he rolled out this fragrance with a satirical marketing campaign that parodies modern body-positive feminist self-help rhetoric. Remember the kooky website where women were supposed to connect with women and talk about the unshakable threads of Womanity stretching across the world? On top of this, the juice is pink (symbol of frou frou conventional femininity), evokes vagina stank with a nice salty oily Secretions-lite accord, and is topped with a terrifying metallic Geiger mask that brings to mind the cover of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, held on with a chain. The fragrance itself is sporty and fresh and highly wearable while also being ashy and gray and somewhat staid. This is high art; this is satire; this is a true transgressive statement done in the capitalist mainstream.

Perfume of Contempt: Lancome Magie Noire

Magie Noire is difficult to talk about for several reasons:

1) It's so weird that you're unsure if it's actually supposed to smell like that or if your sample has gone off.

2) There's a good chance that it has gone off, because it's not a fragrance that seems to preserve well.

3) It was reformulated so many times even before the real heavy-hitting IFRA restrictions of the 00s that each iteration of it smells wildly different.

That said, I've owned roughly seven different bottles of Magie Noire over the years from many different eras, so I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. The really good stuff, that preserves the best and smells the most expensive, comes in the original orange and black bottle. It is a mind-blowing trip and should be smelled in 3-D under the influence of marijuana for maximum effect. It smells evil, and it's not just the marketing. It is disturbingly vegetal in the way that Yatagan is, but draped in feminine opulence-- stewing vegetables in an evening gown. Every real animalic in the book is present in large quantities, creating a rude honeyed dog foot effect. There is an addictive industrial gasoline cast to it all, like something it's unhealthy for you to be smelling.

 Magie Noire wasn't considered that glamorous or highbrow a fragrance in its day, which seems unbelievable to us now. It was common for suburban mothers to smell like this (what I'd give to go back and inhale that air...). It was sort of a knock-off less expensive Opium that places the resins and spices and musty mystery of that fragrance on the framework of the more prevalent sour green chypres of the 70s. It borrowed Opium's image of oriental languor and added to it a satanic angle, with dark, ghoulish, wonderful advertisements and a package design that incorporated foreboding hieroglyphs. Considering the recent ubiquitous popularity of putting satanic imagery and goats and pentagrams on everything, even clothing for unremarkable hipster good girls, Lancome was ahead.

The subsequent formulation with the black plastic mushroom cap is still excellent but seems slimmed down and cheapened. It is more peppery and conventionally woody, but still disturbing in its vegetable sourness. There is also a weird formulation packaged in a black plastic flask; do not buy this. Because of the cheap packaging, none of them have kept and they have all gone completely off. You will see reports of this anywhere there is talk of vintage Magie Noire.

After this it was briefly discontinued and brought back in a still-interesting version in a clear bottle that smells not unpleasantly like a drugstore knock-off. It's all sneezy black pepper and sour rose and, like everything else from the 80s that's still in production, doesn't have base notes to speak of. This version is still easy to come by and gives you a hint of what the real stuff was like, and it can be appreciated as a sort of "If you like Magie Noire, you'll love Sexy Magic" body spray.

As with Aromatics, I once thought Magie Noire was my signature scent. I spent untold dollars amassing vintage bottles of it on eBay to wear for the rest of my life. I quit wearing it cause I smelled like a lunatic. It makes an exciting appearance in Working Girl, the perfume-lover's dream movie. Melanie Griffith is sitting at Sigourney Weaver's vanity and applies extrait from the black and orange bottle.

Comme des Garçons EDP (1994)

"A perfume that works like a medicine and behaves like a drug."

The flagship  unisex Comme des Garçons fragrance was launched in 1994, the same year as unisex blockbuster CK One. I have never lived in New York and was born in 1987, but I like to imagine that I could've smelled a lot of CdG in avant-garde circles in the 90s in the way that fashion blogs mention Le Labo Santal 33 as the ubiquitous New York scent right now.

Comme des Garçons fragrances are famous for prominent cedar and incense, and these elements are present in the original under its overarching potpourri theme. The opening of CdG is a satisfyingly suffocating blast of cinnamon, clove, rose, and pepper that feels medicinal, like Tiger Balm. I would think that it was inspired by Diptyque's 1968 L'Eau, the original avant-garde unisex rich hippie potpourri fragrance. As time passes, the potpourri elements recede to the background and are overtaken by a sticky, intensely animalic honey. I usually don't see CdG mentioned as an animalic fragrance, but on me it is pornographic in anything but the coldest of weather. The honey is sticky, unclean, vaginal, anal--the smell of your upper lip after administering a rim job. It stays for hours.

The combination of dowdy references and pornography in CdG make it a perennial favorite for me. Perhaps it is my mental image of deconstructed, purposefully messy CdG clothing, but I feel like this is a very versatile everyday fragrance that's great when worn with sloppy normcore fashion. The brilliant print ad, with a woman on a NY street in a plain Guess sweatshirt brandishing the "uncommon object" bottle like a defense against the elements, a pomander against the plague, reinforces this image. Sometimes it can feel sticky and gross,like Angel, but other times it has a crispness that is just the thing. It functions well in heat and cold; in heat the honey comes out more quickly, and the potpourri sticks around longer in the cold. It is exceptional and still my favorite CdG perfume.