a small collection of spring flowers in bloom
a list of perfumes that smell like things growing in may
hi friends, it’s been a while.
in full disclosure, most of my life for the last few months has involved fighting off growing disfunction in my personal romantic and subconscious lives by furiously weaving on the jacquard loom and writing a spiraling autotheoretical book on devotional sadism and castration, all in an effort to finish my master’s degree at an art school in a large midwestern city i’ve come to love like my favorite young adult manic pixie dream boy once said you fall asleep: slowly and then all at once. needless to say, i had really big plans for this account at some point. in my drafts right now are two different three part series. i had intended for them to mirror the format of the three articles i posted on non-floral notes i retroactively and pretentiously titled AGAINST NATURE (like letterboxd pro subscribers would say, keeping the title in all caps is important). without revealing too much in case i do ever work up the ability to finish them, the first was about the different ways in which scent can offer us comfort, and the second was a similar perfume-notes roundup of all white floral notes in perfumery titled and styled after krzysztof kieślowski’s three colors trilogy. if i recall correctly i went on a very extended emotional monologue about grace kelly and audrey hepburn bringing lily of the valley as a bouquet to their weddings. i definitely made myself cry.
needless to say i brought lily of the valley to my graduation last week, and now suddenly my old art school life is gone and i’m living at home in the south with my parents, and my world suddenly feels a lot smaller and my desire to write to what small audience i have amassed here earnestly and without form feels more urgent. i have a number of plans this summer focused on bettering my physical and mental health, but in the meantime i’m trying to embrace that awkward part of your early twenties where you have no idea what your life is going to consist of but you feel it rushing at you so fast you get whiplash. a big part of how i find joy is wild flowers, and chicago in the springtime has offered up its best. here is a short roundup of some of my favorite yearly blooms, and the perfumes you can buy to capture their fleeting and ethereal scents.
comme des garçons, lily
the name lily of the valley comes from the song of solomon. “i am a rose of sharon, a lily of the valleys. like a lily among thorns is my darling among the maidens.” there have been many, many, other lilies of many other valleys, but this one is mine. i have a great amount of love for muget as a floral accord, and in my quest to learn more about perfumery, i also have a great amount of respect for the perfumers who construct it – because while the scent itself is natural, it cannot be naturally harvested in perfumery and thus must be painstakingly created from synthetic accords. getting real, 1er mai celebration muget is not an easy task. there are a number of facets. i actually namedrop most of them in the introduction to my post on aldehydes as a rhetorical tool to describe the amount of effort that goes into making things smell “natural.” needless to say something about comme des garçons’ lily just does it for me. it’s like a sleight of hand. a house notorious for synthetic and experimental scents (and clothing) very quietly drops an extremely simple realistic soliflore. it’s almost funny. like when the intense punk rockstar suddenly reveals that he’s also trained in classical piano.
needless to say, this perfume is soapy in all the right places, simple, delicate, and achingly realistic. i wore this very frequently during the month of may, and would often literally compare it to the real thing by smelling my arm and then smelling the flower itself. lily of the valley grew wild back in chicago. i passed it, sprouting up from behind the uptown public library. little bells ringing sharply, like marbles being thrown against a mirror. like the virgin mother, it brings a tear to my eye, truly.
if you’ve encountered this blog via some other facet of my internet presence, you’ve probably become aware of how deep my obsession with lilacs has become this spring. i have quite literally, been boiling them into water and drinking it like tea.
i consider myself one of the more seasoned lilac-posters on this side of the internet, and feel uniquely qualified to explain what it is about lilacs that enchants me so. to me, lilacs are a hybrid of the milky, indolic aspects of jasmine (a floral scent that bears great emotional significance in my mind) and the watery, powdery-floral atmosphere of something like wisteria. the scent feels uniquely arresting – proustian if you will – in its capacity to capture a heavy sort of listlessness you can’t help but need to sigh off. lilac feels like a memory complicitly bound in its own decay. moreso than any other flower i think, lilac smells like it will die. something about that speaks to me. they are also supposedly noted silver fox dreamboat frédéric malle’s favorite flower, so you know… pierre (can i call you that?) if you ever get a weekend out of paris, call me.
universal flowering, lilac #4
among the three lilacs i’ve non-consensually gathered for you today, this is most realistic in its drydown. at first combining aspects of wet dirt, crushed stems, and milky piths, lilac #4 smells both irrevocably organic and deeply opulent. like many of my friends online, i’ve also become quite endeared to the work of toronto-based perfumer courtney rafuse. here, i see her trained on florals in the same voice she uses to speak creations like venus in tuberose: thick, seductive, and heady. in an interview once, rafuse described the necessity of capturing a flower in all its vicissitudes:
If it was all bright it would be awful. A flower doesn’t just have nice smells. There’s the green weird part.
And then it dies.
And it smells awful.
sometimes i think it is the explicit job of perfume not to just capture good smells, but to capture true smells. not necessarily smells that are realistic, but rather abstract compositions that in their creative power evoke something true about how we as people feel and love and learn and connect with the world around us, even when that involves the inclusion of death and decay. not to be too dramatic, but i think lilac #4 is one such perfume.
frédéric malle, en passant
if you held a gun to my head and told me to name the best lilac perfume in the world, first of all i would probably be at least a little turned on, and second of all i would say en passant. it seems curious but not wholly surprising to me that women do lilac best. not to be essentialist about it, but lilac requires subtlety. and noted girl genius and elusive perfume superstar olivia giacobetti quite literally runs that game. the nose behind such innovations as philosykos and tea for two, not only have i cited her work in previous writing for this blog, but i will quite literally cite another one of her works later on in this very article. there are some perfumers whose talent is in their adaptability. dominique ropion, for example, will find a job – be it with mugler or dior, and he will do it well – fitting into whatever image the assignment requires like a chameleon. some perfumers, however, treat their list of creations like a single, linear progression of work, using creations across different houses as placeholders for specific pieces of their recognizable inner olfactory world. in many ways, what frédéric malle has championed through his founding of editions de parfums is a production house for these singular perfume auteurs. this is hardly surprising, given malle’s connection to the french film industry and his love of cinema. like american zoetrope and the new hollywood, malle only aims to connect his favorite perfumers to the resources needed to make their perfume. what they might have been hiding in their lab, afraid to show the world, perhaps for fears of underselling, or not connecting with a wider audience, he wants to spotlight. consequentially, i do give a certain degree of weight to the one perfume giacobetti designed for malle. this is not just a frédéric malle perfume, this is an olivia giacobetti joint.
what she made, is in essence, another lilac soliflore. malle once described it as a woman’s skin. i can understand why. she pairs a delicate and hyper-realistic lilac accord with fresh water, introduces a notorious cucumber note that both adds to the vegetal greenness and provides a crisp sort of snap, and rests it all on a delicate base of wheat grain. quintessentially france in the springtime, en passant does something to me emotionally i’m not sure i can completely describe. most perfume takes me out of my body, locates me within a specific scene or moment. en passant, however, makes me feel grounded within myself, sends chills reverberating down my spine.
if you can tell, i have a tendency to become overly effusive when it comes to lilac – but the central point here stands which is that when perfume is done well, it doesn’t just make you feel like someone else who has desirable traits like beauty or elegance, it just makes you feel like you. not transcendental, but meditative. a maddening but also hopeful sort of realization, at least i think so.
le labo, iris 39
moving on, i want to spend a little bit, but surely not long enough, talking about a flower that was perhaps one of my first loves and introduction to perfumery proper. iris, grande dame she is, takes on many names. she is orris butter, used as a central ingredient in making the cool doughy base to all purple florals, she is light powder used in my ever-beloved genre of lipstick accords, but also, she is an earthy, true-to-life floral scent, smelled often during the springtime. i want to only touch here upon the irises i know and love that capture the actual scent of the flower itself, not the scent of its extracts or its possible uses, lest i write you an entire novel at 11:51am on a tuesday night. the first of these narrowly realistic irises is iris 39. a scent not often spoken of by the wider audience that enjoys the olfactory stylings of le labo, it was one of the first scents from the house i truly enjoyed, but for a while was also one that was in danger of being discontinued. i received word from a friend on the inside so to speak that it had been removed from the chopping block, but still, i consider it one of the least accessible scents on their very accessible roster. the reason why, to be honest, is the huge injection of patchouli they give to the iris centerpiece. i didn’t always enjoy this part of the perfume, but with some perspective, i find it extremely unique in creating a more earthy feeling iris. while often sharp and powerful in its mustiness, the inclusion of a patchouli-civet heart rounds out a very weak floral into something more bodied. almost like an animalic iris-chypre, interestingly enough i get complimented on this almost every single time i wear it out.
hermès, hiris
as promised, a second giacobetti. hiris is one of her more famous and stylistically innovative perfumes, in short, because it smells exactly like fresh iris pulled from the ground in all its earthy, nutty, creamy totality. no one had ever accomplished this before, much less under the helm of a world class haute couture house. iris was a plant to be used in perfume via its roots, but not for the smell of its flowers. here she trains her trademark gentle realism on the overlooked facets of this springtime bloom. her holistic philosophy for philosykos, to capture the complete smell of a fig tree from bark to leaves to fruit, is also applied here. hiris uses carrot seed liberally to give a fresh green-spicy overtone, but also to add to the retroactive creation of iris rhizome. it is a genius conceit. combine boiled vegetables, a dash of coriander seed, cedar and honey, and somehow out comes iris. last year, when i was told by a misguided nordstrom sales associate that it was being discontinued, i would take weekly trips on the red line down to walk into the store on michigan ave, douse myself with the tester, and promptly leave. since then i have not only learned that it is here to stay, but also have come into a vintage blue bottle version of the scent. it has been slightly reformulated from the bottle pictured above to its current transparent glass counterpart, and is much stronger in its old formulation. regardless, any copy you can find is worth smelling and in my opinion buying. all's well that ends well, i suppose.
byredo, la tulipe
a quick open letter of apology to “by redolence” perfumes. i know i’ve slandered you on public forms more times than i can count, but actually, between eyes closed and starting to enjoy this one, i think i might have been too harsh on you. that said i still think most of your top selling perfumes peddle the same four smells to design school nepo babies and the people who tolerate them. can we still be work friends?
i think what endeared me to la tulipe was thinking of it less as a perfectly realistic tulip smell, and more of an alexander calder bright red outline of a tulip. what it truly does nail is the waxiness. that alone would be enough to get most people to associate it with the deeply dutch flower. wait. have we come full circle? i made a poorly timed the fault in our stars reference at the beginning of this article and i am herein poised to make one again. “augustus waters was sitting on the front step as we pulled into the driveway. he was holding a bouquet of bright orange tulips just beginning to bloom.” this is maybe what those tulips smelled like as an imagined memory in a young adult novel i was obsessed with as a kid that had a cover i remember for being notoriously super plasticky smelling. the rhubarb here does a lot of good work. again, tulip is an accord that must be stitched together, which is why you see so little of it in most of perfume history. here it is assembled simply, adorned by perhaps a distracting set of green notes, but successful in its incorporation of freesia. i wish everyone who bought a bottle of mojave ghost would exchange it for this. there’s not much they would be disappointed by. it’s a very easy scent to like, i promise. that way the world and the halls of the school of the art institute of chicago may finally know peace.
‘eat your lipstick’ is a perfume blog by audrey robinovitz, @foldyrhands
your writing is incredible! i only have a passing interest in perfume but i can't help but read the entire post with a smile on my face just because of how well it's written. excited to see what you write next :)
omg i've been chasing hiris...i love these missals so much! they remind me of old-school fashion mags :-)