NOSTALGHIA, part one: something comforting
on the elusive ideal of the emotional support perfume, and other scented reassurances
As winter begins to show her rugged face to the hapless American South, so too, is it time to begin the second three-part series slash vanity project on my perfume blog after long and regrettable delay. The first series, now retroactively labeled AGAINST NATURE, dealt with profiling three specific non-floral smells I’m sure you are now familiar with. This new series, however, will focus less on individual notes and more on the process of how we remember smell. Collective memory, personal meaning, cultural association are a crucial part of how i ‘read’ perfume so to speak, and I find my criticism far more inspired by Art History and Literary Criticism than most beauty writing I can find online. To this effect, NOSTALGHIA will be an argument towards perfume as sentimental object and cultural text. So sit back, grab a box of tissues, and cry with me.
Régime des Fleurs, Tears
There was nowhere else for this story to start. For a perfume I hold in such high regard, these will be the first words i have ever written on it, and even the first time I have considered it critically beyond a simple “oh, that’s gorgeous.” Something about this perfume, be it the affectual concept or the understated execution, feels too personal to describe publicly. It’s lilac, yes – of course. But there’s something else there. Something between the cool, watery orris and salty-sweet ambergris that creates a trail somewhat like vapor. If Guerlain’s bratty-chic masterpiece Insolence smells like fairy makeup, made in the early aughts as a gateway to classic French perfumery for the teenage daughters of heritage European intelligentsia – Tears is mascara and glitter stained crocodile tears spilled at the clipping of a fairy’s wings. If the stock scene in Revolutionary Girl Utena where Utena’s rose seal unlocks the gate to the dueling arena with a single delicate drop of water had a smell, this would be it, to a tee.
Yet tears is not, in fact, fresh lilac, nor is it as complete in its realism as other soliflores mentioned in my earlier review. It is the idea of lilac in decay. it is the beauty of a flower contained, heightened by its fleeting nature. It is precarious femininity, it is lost youth, it is summers pedaling hard through upstate New Work or southern Kansas or Seattle Washington or anywhere once-cold enough for the blooms to take hold, now all primeval and grainy and washed out in memory’s unfaithful eye. Washed through a sieve and doused in neat cognac, it is the quiet assurance that as you grow, the things you love will always leave you: no less sweeter on your tongue than during the few short moments when they were yours and yours alone.
Jo Malone, Wood Sage and Sea Salt
The house of Jo Malone, founded in the 90s by its eponymous essential oil vendeuse turned natural perfume maven, has caught a lot of flak in the last few years – especially with regard to this scent – for reasons that I feel are deeply indicative of the current tastes of this generation’s Sephora girlies. I hypothesize that there is around a decade and a half long pendulum that swings back and forth with cultural tastes. the beginning of the cycle was the mid-80s, where neo-oriental powerhouses with massive trails like Obsession and Poison were all the rage. From there the 90s dawned into the aughts, and with it the birth of gentle, clean perfumes like Light Blue and Green Tea. then, in the early 2010s when citruses began to smell more like floor cleaner, the fantasy of natural living began to feel more like a hippie pipe dream, and people got tired of spending money on beauty products no one ever noticed – enter the intense sillage of Santal 33, the cherry chemical warfare of La Vie est Belle, and so on. We are still riding the tail end of this bigger is better trend, and thusly, Jo Malone’s most common complaint – “they just don’t perform” – is enough to bar a lot of people from even smelling it. Of course, my thoughts on this are slightly more complicated. While I hardly would classify Jo Malone as a perfect house, I am often frustrated by how inflexible American markets are to receive an eau de cologne: perfume compounded at less concentration than an eau de toilette or eau de parfum, the two most common ratios on the market today. What’s interesting to me is that in cultures where loud perfume is seen as offensive, like those in East Asia, Jo Malone sells fabulously. It seems like a perfect fit. When Americans think of Japanese perfume, for example, there is often a huge amount of pre-conception based on orientalist fantasies of tea-scented clouds, deep hinoki woods, etc. But in reality, a perfume commonly worn on the necks of Japanese women is the irrevocably British scent profile of English Pear and Freesia. Who could have guessed that exoticism sells luxury, no matter where you are? The English print on the sturdy rectangular glass bottles, almost reminiscent of columns of a Western-style estate, is actually as much of a selling point as Japanese text is on a poorly executed American t-shirt. It indicates luxury: the flow of global capital towards anglophone countries, and the afterimages of colonial trade intervention. Needless to say, the specific hesitancy around Jo Malone’s delicate compositions are not universal. Moreover, i’ve found that eau de colonge concentrations allow a certain degree of breathing room for your aromachemicals. Things are perhaps harder to smell on first application, but scents are very much rendered more naturalistically, more poignantly. This is not the case for every perfume of course. But this is just to say that perfumes with “bad” performance read to me as less of a failure and more of a mood or voice to speak in – like rendering a painting in only subtle, off-white colors.
With my defense of Jo Malone as an institution out of the way, there is a specific critique I have rarely seen leveled at wood sage and sea salt, that I think is a worthwhile one. It’s literally just salty ambrette. That is in my mind the terrible secret it hides, that its composition is formed by basically just pairing a very tender muskmallow with calone molecules and calling it a day. The effect created is not standing by a windy English shoreline, as was likely envisioned, but rather: sparkly, salty tears. This is to me, another scent of water evaporating – the smell of a streaked face beginning to dry up. I wear this right out of a shower to take a few deep scented breaths, and have a blank slate still ready after drying my hair to apply my regular more pronounced perfume for the day. Generally i’ve also found Jo Malone perfumes perfect for drifting off to sleep. A quiet, delicate luxury that won’t challenge or provoke you as you pass between the waking world and the land of dreams. This scent is to me, comforting in its simplicity. I fear that which i cannot understand. Wood Sage and Sea Salt won’t woo your friends or push any boundaries, but when all you need is to feel at ease, it will do just fine.
Lush, Lust solid perfume
Lush Lust is either one of those scents you love or you hate. I won’t pretend it’s for everyone. the polar opposite of Jo Malone inasmuch as the main reason people don’t like this perfume is because it’s so. fucking. strong. As a chronic oversprayer, this is a three pump at max perfume in liquid form. Its juice is bright red and often stains your clothes. You could possibly kill a woman over 70 wearing it in public. Needless to say I enjoy through gritted teeth Lush’s synthetic triangulation between jasmine honeysuckle and sandalwood, but in the last year i’ve been pleasantly surprised that one of its flanker products, the $16 USD solid perfume, has almost entirely resolved most of the reasons I found this fragrance unpalatable. Firstly, when the perfumed material is solid, you can selectively apply the deep red color to your skin, taking care to not stain your clothes. Secondly, while solid perfume usually performs worse than its alcohol counterparts, this suits Lust perfectly, as what was once screeching turns into the normal to strong performance you might expect from an eau de parfum. I haven’t even mentioned the price – this is at least 75% cheaper than buying the liquid, and lasts a very long time. Maybe this is my own bias as well, but I’ve found that this slightly more tame projection lets the notes really air out, and it smells a lot more natural than i’ve experienced through spraying. I keep a tin of this in my purse at all times. I carry it anywhere and re-apply it like my own little ritual in moments of stress, pain, happiness, or emotion as if to say – focus. You’ll notice that a lot of the smells that comfort me are jasmine-centered, as the heady, milky bloom reminds me of a childhood spent listless yet decisively rooted in South Carolina. Lust is that smell, hyperaccelerated and hardened jagged par-excellence. This might be my all time most complimented perfume, and it isn’t even something you can spray.
Diptyque, Gardenia candle
Also not a perfume in the classical sense, I know. but in the same vein as Lust, this is the smell of fresh white florals – gardenia specifically – wafted through the air on long walks through the many historic districts of South Carolina and Coastal Georgia. Where I’m from, these slightly minty, creamy, spiced blooms grow everywhere, and the smell alone, captured near-photorealistically in Diptyque’s titular candle reminds me of the precious moments of spring turning into hot sweltering summer. Gardenia itself is very difficult note to reconstruct in perfumery as a result the layered complexity of its pure, milky, aroma. Like Billie Holiday tenderly placing a signature gardenia in her hair, this candle is a call to all things delicate and beautiful about the American South. Almost Flannery O’Connor, but not nearly dark or foreboding enough.
Guerlain, Cuir Béluga
My favorite entry into the high end L'art & la Matière (trans. art and material) collection from once-perfumers to the french royal court, Cuir Béluga carries all the trappings of royalty. Designed to evoke the feeling of supple white suede, it wears like the most delicate powdery-sweet pair of evening gloves. Boldly centered around the all-too-common note of vanilla, this perfume elevates the gourmand to befit the most sophisticated and discerning of palates. Paired with creamy heliotrope, soft leather, immortelle, aldehyde, and a whimsical dash of tangerine, a single spray of my treasured decant of this perfume is enough to make me feel like a bona fide princess. There are faint echoes of Guerlain’s indispensable 1925 flapper fairy tale Shalimar in the way amber and vanilla combine to form something more than the sum of their parts. Wear this to the opera, or whenever the inevitable dark and fearful moments of our lives call for a little touch of class to go a long, long way.
Stora Skuggan, Thumbsucker
Inspired by ancient Hindu myth of a childless king accidentally using alchemical magic to impregnate himself, Thumbsucker balances these archetypal and mischievous themes with the perfumer’s self-professed effort to create the perfect hangover cure. As an undeniable lightweight with a self-professed critical admiration for the late temperance movement, I cannot claim to experience a bona fide hangover all too often in my daily life, but I can claim that Thumbsucker, no matter your lifestyle habits, is the perfect cure for a number of duplicitous physio-spiritual maladies. Improving upon the almond-cherry DNA at the heart of a number of the decade’s most successful and mediocre girl smells with a skanky, powdery, and distinctly 20th century varietal of honeyed boudoir flowerbombs – Thumbsucker is like dragging the furs of a woman about town through a March’s worth of pollen allergens. There is something medicinal and bracing at the start, as if to use the harshest aspects of narcissus to wake you from your drunken stupor. From there, it settles into a powdery-sweet plasticine cherry abetted by the inclusion of violet and beeswax. Lasting for hours on skin, I would wear this to get sloppy and visceral brunch with friends at 2:30 in the afternoon, or to court a withholding gentleman at an outdoor bar in the springtime. Equally at home in public and private spheres, Thumbsucker proves to be an essential staple in the collection of salacious career women and minxy flirts of all walks of life looking to adopt a comforting yet tasteful signature.
INUX, talc
Perhaps the most inaccessible perfume I have ever written a glowing public-facing review of, talc was an obscure release by Olivia Giacobetti’s breif-lived European perfume imprint INUX. There are likely a few hundred of these giant, unbearably phallic bottles in existence, and I just so happen to have had the privilege of smelling one. This perfume is inspired by butoh, a 20th century strain of experimental dance formed by Japanese creatives as a reaction against the Eurocentric cultural tradition of the midcentury avant-garde. Deriving its name from "ankoku butō" (暗黒舞踏, trans. "dance of darkness”), butoh’s aesthetics revolve around covering the body entirely with white makeup, and its physical language is built from a vocabulary of "crude physical gestures and uncouth habits... a direct assault on the refinement (miyabi) and understatement (shibui) so valued in Japanese aesthetics."
As a perfume itself, I find talc mediates this choreographic stillness and tension startlingly well. This is principally, an orris. Giacobetti had tackled this territory before, most notably in her luxurious hand cream for Frederic Malle made to revitalize the Medici tradition of Italian royalty lining their gloves with expensive orris butter. Talc, however, distincts itself by using its powdery nature to beckon both white chalk and pure white noise. If what traces of unknowable emptiness that existed before the creation of the universe had a smell, this would surely be it. Supported by a creamy, toasty note of white rice, it is an achingly delicate scent that demands to be experienced in complete sensory isolation. Into the drydown, musky ambrette takes center stage, contorting its supple form in subtle and short-lived ambulations. This perfume is comforting to me in the same way I lock myself in a pitch black room and wait until afterimages imprinted on my retinas start to create little stars. Wear this to be the hottest girl in the sensory deprivation tank, or just to make your wrist smell like some of Rauschenberg’s most controversial and well-loved painting.
Fzotic, Toasted Lilac Soap
Yet another non-perfume entity, but hey, at $18 a bar, I would be doing you a disservice not to put you onto Bruno Fazzolari’s artisan soap side hustle. The artist-turned perfumer behind many admirable perfumes, this variety of soap takes his penchant for gourmands in unexpected places into the realm of the floral. Blending powdery lilac with creamy milk and toasted bread, this smells like spreading the petals of a pleasantly purple flower on artisan French Toast. I almost exclusively wash my body with this soap during the temperate on-and-off heat of a Chicago spring/summer season, and if you’re looking to add a small ritual of comfort and luxury to your self-care routine, I would highly recommend it as well.
Serge Lutens, Jeux de Peau
Another endangered European species, one should treasure what scant traces can be sourced of this enigmatic milk masterclass. I had caught talk of this perfume far before I ultimately added it to my collection — in many ways its reputation as Lutens’ gourmand to end all gourmands precedes itself. Primarily a dense and cultured sort of bread porridge, Jeux de Peau (trans. skin games) plays tauntingly across the skin in dashes of wheat, whipping cream, apricot, and milky sandalwood. As comforting as homemade desert by your estranged, quietly affectionate grandmother, Jeux de Peau carries with it the French and global cultural language typical to Lutens’ prestige, while also smelling like something that could genuinely appeal to the masses of people who crowd Sephrora for their next hit of average-ish gelato perfume. Wear this to bed to dream Maurice Sendak-like fever apparitions of the night kitchen, or just to make a good impression on the ghost of Julia Child during late light ouija board sessions at your favorite patisserie.
January Scent Project, Selperniku
A reverent and inventive homage to the legacy of Jeux de Peau, the unlikely bestseller from John Beibel’s Rhode Island-based January Scent Project defies all possible laws of perfumery. A milk scent that lasts all day on skin, a completely unisex gourmand, an herbal-woody perfume that just happens to be doused in butter, Selperniku is a tangle of beguiling contradictions. Structured around a photorealistic and persistent accord of savory butter blended with nubile skin-like injections of salty apricot: this is a gaudy, almost lotion-like perfume with a strange and confusing sort of public allure. I find that when speaking of scent and comfort, it is impossible to avoid the deeply psychoanalytic connection between the nurturing lactonic profile of milk and the ghost of the child’s mother-bond. Nowhere is this presence more apparent than in Selperniku’s staggering sillage. Wear this perfume to make your emotionally unavailable situationship finally commit to you by subtly confusing your presence in his mind with that of his over-affectionate mother, or just to smell like the most fertile and Rubenesque milk maiden at the village market.
Hima Jomo, Winter in Manaslu
Departing from milk but still firmly within the realm of the drinkable, the highlight of last year’s release of four seasonal scents by Himalayan devotees Hima Jomo is a cup of expertly steeped mint tea. Opening with bracing and spicy mint, this perfume feels exactly like the feeling of watching your breath turn to steam against bitingly cold air. Crisp basil and star anise are supporting players to the larger tea-like accord, but the primary effect is principally that of spearmint. Into the drydown the larger scene begins to develop, as pine cypress and cedar trees slowly envelop your humble cup. For a few brief moments after spraying this perfume I am alone, standing on the balcony of my snowy Asiatic mountaineering town.
Serge Lutens, Fille en Aiguilles
I’m sorry if it’s cheating to include two perfumes by my beloved stern and slightly mad grandfather Serge Lutens on the tail end of this list, but they are both truly comforting to me in distinctly different ways. Fille en Aiguilles (trans. girl in needles) is the gentle embrace of all things comforting about the December slouch towards Christmas: my favorite time of year. Evoking a visceral and arresting scent memory to me of the pinestraw that littered the ground of my elementary school playground, Aiguilles is at once rigorously conceptual and immediately emotionally affective. Clearly the first and most important smell is photorealistic pine, but this is hardly frasier fir. The note notorious for potential association with Pine-Sol or cheap holiday candles here smells sappy, like your fingers after picking at the bark from a row of slender trees. The two most distinct supporting notes are incense – sooty and heady – and dried fruit. The latter accord appears across more of Lutens’ work, but this is in my opinion its peak. It is at once jammy and mature: less fruit snack and more sun-dried prunes. The combination of these three distinct accords is something decisively more than the sum of its parts. Like a yuletide altar, Fille en Aiguilles is reverent and ceremonial as much as it also evokes teary-eyed Christmas comforts. There is a linguistic and conceptual game afoot here – Lutens means for the sharp stabs of pine needles to evoke perhaps a woman’s clacking footsteps, pointed stiletto heels against smooth wooden flooring. All allegories aside, this is not only the most notable use of a pine note to my memory, but one of my favorite perfumes of all time. Wear it on Christmas morning, or to cloak your movements as you hunt a large bear to sacrifice to the Princess Mononoke-style Kodama spirits of the vast northern forest.
‘eat your lipstick’ is a perfume blog by audrey robinovitz, @foldyrhands
impeccably written, very excited for the rest of this trio
the first time i've ever seen lust solid mentioned in perfume writing... i love it so much, it used to be my go-to travel fragrance. so glad yr back audrey <3 perfect and searing as usual