NOSTALGHIA, part two: perfume poptimism

base notes on camp, and why bad perfume isn't always bad perfume

I can imagine some of you likely regard this title with doubt. I understand that as a critic of perfume I am hardly known for my love of accessible or widely available fragrances. That said, like most people, malls and beauty supply stores were where I first started to love perfume, and the realm of ‘pop culture’ fragrance as it were still carries a number of deeply emotionally affective and technically notable compositions. This is my attempt to catalouge a few of these biographical and vernacular impressions, and to mediate, perhaps, on why the luxury of perfume feels at once so inaccessible, and so much like home.

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Of all the finer things in life, perfume is undoubtedly the trashiest. The idea of ‘cheap perfume’ seems to be somehow both a socioeconomic location, and an attempt to transcend and transgress class boundaries with beauty. From the very beginning, perfume was a piece of fashion you could touch. The original Miss Dior was a small chunk of Christian Dior’s flesh, his heart – even – the average woman could just barely afford to own. Small crystalline dogs sit neatly upon their back legs with a collar that reads – J'Appartiens a Miss Dior! (trans. I belong to Miss Dior!). The subtext here is clear: perfume has always been a way for laypeople to indulge in the fantasy of becoming luxury itself. But why, then, does a seemingly masochistic view of this commodity fetish – one that places the grandeur of its aspirations against the reality of perfume’s cheapness and disposability – feel so damn endearing? Perhaps, I will argue, there is a certain pathos in knowing that the dream is only a dream, and still dreaming it for dreaming’s sake. The beauty of popular perfume to me, is one of artifice. It harkens back to an emotional moment where perfume was something special and strange your mom kept on the top of her dresser. Just barely out of reach, you strain towards it like a moth to a flame – hoping to capture some contrived essence of what turns girls into women: what galvanizes somewhere between your unformed breasts to make your boyish prepubescent body into the same stuff of stars. You know now, the name of that scintillating star you were reaching for – and it can be bought at Ulta for ninety five dollars, even.

Mugler’s 1992 Angel hit the shelves and the subconsciousness of Middle America as hard as the first brick thrown at Stonewall met an unsuspecting cop’s face. The impact this perfume had upon the landscape of not only designer but niche fragrance cannot be understated. Often heralded the first gourmand, its noxious mix of cotton candy, honey, fruits, chocolate, and patchouli is unmistakeable. Believe it or not, this was the first major perfume to smell entirely like something you could eat. I have written at notorious length about the politics of women smelling like food, but needless to say this problematic dynamic is now virtually inescapable in modern life. Angel, however, speaks the subversive language of unrepentant y2k maximalism. There is a delightful performance here of men being punished with an excess of what they want – sweet, sticky, slutty, syrupy, sexy smells broadcast so loud they cease being alluring and only make your ears bleed. If Mitsuoko was the 20th century’s first perfume – all enigmatic and earthen – Angel is the last real perfume of the century: heralding Modernism’s breathy collapse towards Post-Modernism with a cacophony of coconut consumerist cum-tributes. The fulcrum around which this perfume fluctuates is the patchouli note. Without it, Angel would be all clouds – sweet, saccharine, and nothing more. Isolated, the patchouli kills the party. You can find countless reviews on fragrantica calling it “disgusting,” “sweaty,” “body odor-like,” ad infinitum. But as jasmine needs cat-pee-indoles and rose needs civet secretions, Angel’s cotton candy needs that dank patchouli base to truly shine. An exquisite candy corpse, what makes Angel’s chemical makeup unique is the first real use of ethyl maltol as a main note. Originally used as a food flavoring to mimic the taste of chocolate, trace amounts had been used in other perfumes before, but here it was held front and center. Alongside a near 30% inclusion of patchouli, I am reminded weirdly enough of Fzotic’s Corpse Reviver – an off-kilter niche perfume consisting mainly of the marriage between chocolate cake and animalic whiskey. Needless to say, Angel is, to me, a lighting-in-a-bottle moment of one off designer experimentalism. Where else can we find a perfume idiosyncratic enough to be worn by both Nicole Kidman and Hillary Clinton. Wear this to an orgy or to the opera. You’ll be sure to turn heads and trigger gag reflexes either way.

On the other side of fantasy lies Pacifica’s Island Vanilla. I have to imagine that to a fifteen year old boy’s imagination this is what all girls just naturally smell like. Like all Pacifica perfumes, it opens harshly and acerbic, but settles peacefully on the skin. After the opening somewhat reminiscent of baby wipes, it dries down into a powdery, somewhat honeyed vanilla. The titular bean here is somewhere between Maison Tahité’s Vanilla² and the original Philosophy Fresh Cream. Its sillage and longevity wears with the intimacy and brevity of a body mist, but one gets the feeling that a perfume designed to be popular with teenagers shouldn’t exactly be turning heads. The appeal of Island Vanilla to me is one of a profund yearning – a placeholder sweet smell to pair with an old pair of Keds and homoerotically wishing you could be like the cutest girl at school. Not many perfumes truly spark nostalgia within me for being a deeply confused freshman in high school again, but this one surprisingly does.

Maybe the most ‘obscure’ perfume on this very accessible listicle, Kiehl’s Original Musk crashes in with an Austin Powers-esque goofy sexual charisma. Retailing for $48 on their website and available in most physical stores, this is a classical deer musk perfume that evokes the fuzzy, warm, and urine-like undertones to real animal musk as it used to reign. It’s kind of remarkable to me how a namesake perfume from a glossier-like skincare company smells most closely in reference to Serge Lutens’ post-oriental Muscs Koublai Khan and Marlou’s hot-girl-viscera Carnicure. This is, to my nose, an extremely sophisticated scent profile for how affordable and popular this perfume has proven to be. It’s kind of hilarious how the actual copy merely mentions “creamy, fresh citrus” and “floral bouquets.” I almost think eschewing the common scent platitudes to straight up admit this smells like a 70s porn star trying to hook up with your teenage grandmother would actually get more people to buy it. With respectable performance to boot, a 100ml bottle is worth dropping the cost of an okay dinner to be sure you’ll eat for the next five years.

I admit I am just one of a near-infinite amount of women with a soft spot for Vera Wang’s Princess. It is one of the most popular perfumes to give girls who are surely too young for perfume, and so naturally I identify with the inherent feminine preciousness needed to beg your parents for a bottle of this at Ross when you could easily wait three years to have any number of the pastel-colored atrocities in the Chanel Chance collection. It’s funny, because for how common it was on the dressers of middle America, Princess actually has a somewhat unconventional scent profile. The standout choice here is eschewing an overdose of vanilla for chocolate. There are vanillic undertones in the drydown sure, but to me, the most prominent accords are a demure opening of aqueous water lily and the coco-pebbles heart note. Princess is somewhat of a logical predecessor to both Jo Malone’s Lotus Blossom and Water Lily and Montale’s Chocolate Greedy. I purchased myself a bottle a few years ago, and wear it to bed when I want to either comfort my inner child, or remind my many illustrious butch suitors what kind of femme they’re sleeping with.

I agonized for months over which ‘fine fragrance mist’ I would profile from Bath and Body Works. In terms of the one I wear most frequently (gasp, dear reader, indeed I do often wear multiple), it would be the endearing and brainless Vanilla Bean Noel, but if we’re talking historical importance, it has to be none other than Japanese Cherry Blossom. Pinnacle of mall-core orientalist product design, I once dubbed this mist ‘axe body spray for sensitive middle school girls.’ And indeed, choosing JCB over the infinitely more sexy Victoria’s Secret Bare Vanilla (in my hometown these two stores were right next to each other, forming a sacred Mecca to unattainable femininity in my childhood mind) meant either you had really strict parents, or that you simply did things a little differently. I imagine every 14 year old girl who chooses to wear this virtually being the Fukuda Chiyo-ni of Oconomowoc Wisconsin or Keyser West Virginia or even Fort Worth Texas. Clad in her unbelted kosode, she stands among the plastic sakura blossoms, serenely penning her first and only work:

ten dollars, I spray

ten seconds, vague smell of fruit –

adolescence, gone.

Philosophy’s Falling in Love, while technically a holiday (vaguely winter?) scent, is in my mind perpetually available to any discerning Maxxinista across America. Continuing a vague theme, this is the Trix with milk to Princess’ dry Coco Puffs. The first impression is overwhelming juicy blackberry and sweet cream. The second theme to this piece, and really the general rule to most cheap perfumes, is that the opening to this scent is far more harsh and chemical than the drydown. Once placed on skin, Falling in Love stays entirely static, wearing like manically dipping berry-covered hands into a bowl of neon rainbow cereal. I have it on good word that this perfume is beloved by hot girls everywhere, and it doesn’t even stain your hands red.

Another classic off-price retailer find is Revlon’s 1973 Ciara. I got a cheap bottle of this very early into my perfume journey, and it served as one of my first entry points into the amber genre. It is first and foremost, extremely stuffy – which might rub a lot of people the wrong way. There is a flash of teasing raspberry and ylang-ylang in the opening, but then it quickly turns into a static mix of opoponax and leather. I think among the resins, opoponax is perhaps most misunderstood. Many pass over its fresh, camphoric nature for the more vanillic benzoin, the more tart styrax, or of course the golden child frankincense. If you are considering getting into this myrrh-adjacent gum resin, Diptyque seems to have a soft spot for it, as both their opoponax candle and the Hellenistic Eau Lente serve as great opoponax-centered references. Here, in Ciara, it comes off spicy and androgynous. It warms my heart to see many people in fragrantica reviews say they wore this in high school, because I have yet to see any other perfume make its way into the teeny-bopper market with notes of antique resin leather and incense. Wear Ciara to smell like a mom reminiscing about her days as a psychedelic Bowie-type rocker’s favorite teenage groupie, or just to add a little historic decorum to math class.

I could not possibly address a homily on popular perfume without mentioning perhaps the most popular fragrance of the 2010s: the Baccarat-dupe herself, Ariana Grande Cloud. I think this perfume rose to prominence among fragrance-obsessives through a rumor it was a partial chemical duplicate for Francis Kurkdjian’s Baccarat Rouge 540, but truth be told? I prefer Cloud. There have been an embarrassing amount of times where I asked a girl what she was wearing and found out it was this. I think, somewhere, in an alternate world in which God never called me to the sacred mantle of perfume criticism – where January was just the first month of the year, I might have made this my signature scent. It’s cute, very feminine, and has a sillage large enough to attract men like flies. The contrarian in me wants to say something deprecating about how simple and saccharine this is, how its bomb of synthetic ambroxan foretells the advent of Another 13 and similar iso-e super powerhouses, but I just can’t muster it up. Ari and her million corporate ghost-noses really outdid themselves here. This lasts forever, and comes in a cute plastic bottle-holder. Teenage girls and their clueless boyfriends everywhere, rejoice.

Across the shelf at Ulta lies perhaps my all time favorite vanilla perfume, and one of the great triumphs of the noble genre of things that kind of smell like sexy plastic: Dior’s Hypnotic Poison. Conceived as a flanker to the equally revered Poison – Hypnotic Poison was the New Testament to Angel’s Old Testament. Hail full of grace, sinner friend, for the savior of uninspired gourmands is with thee. Projecting a force field of heliotrope and sweet coconut when first applied, it coats the dermis with a thin film of sweetness, lasting the whole day on skin in a Dionysian romp of all things tempting and delicious. I love the fact that Hypnotic Poison is dubbed a ‘play-doh vanilla’ by both detractors and devotees of the scent, as if the public can’t make up their mind about whether or not to revile or praise what sets this perfume apart. Much like the public reception of Angel, this is in my eyes the mark of a truly innovative fragrance. As someone who gleefully applies the Demeter perfume made to smell like actual play-doh, needless to say I find the way in which almond and heliotrope herein conjure played-with pastel mush incredibly endearing. There is a very interesting essay to be written somewhere else on the theoretical link between gourmands overperforming sweetness and something like Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece 1964: masochism, submission, femininity made onto disruptive excess. I alluded to this with Angel, as well, but this is where gourmands begin to become truly interesting for me. When seduction fails, when patriarchal codes designed to attract, repel – repulsion begins to feel something to me like glee. In consequence I theorize, in one of the first moves of Marxist-fragranticist analysis, that all great world-historic perfumes must appear twice: the opening notes as tragedy, and the drydown as farce.

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‘eat your lipstick’ is a perfume blog by audrey robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and media studies. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.