Yesterday's Perfume

What Vintage or Discontinued Perfume Do You Want to Know More About?

I have a reader named Julie who is obsessed with Weil's Mollie Parnis. Mollie who? you may ask, as I did. Apparently, Mollie Parnis came out in 1978, and it seems to me to have orange blossom, maybe Persicol or some peach note, and perhaps vanilla, oakmoss and/or musk. (Emphasis on the "seems.")

I recently got my hands on a pristine mini of D'Orsay's Voulez-Vous perfume, a gorgeous green chypre with tobacco notes and a massive dose of civet. The Perfumed Court describes it as a green floral with some citrus, and  Gaia at The Non-Blonde says that it's a "haughty floral with plenty of green, hyacinth, rose and a light aldehydic opening" that dries down to "a powdery green with a touch of vetiver." Are we all kind of in the same ballpark? Ummm, I dunno! That's the beauty and frustrating thing about perfume: it's a wily thing...

I'm encountering more and more perfumes of the "obscure" or forgotten variety that I love and want to feature in my upcoming book on 20th century perfume, Scent and Subversion. But I want to be able to say something substantial about them, and I often find that when I have some notes to hold onto, I don't feel like I'm sinking into the "impalpable effluvia" of perfume (as Italo Calvino described it). I love perfume (obviously), my nose isn't half bad at detecting notes, but I'm not a perfumer or a chemist, so my educated guesses are just that — guesses.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I've enlisted the amazing Octavian Coifan of 1000Fragrances blog fame to sample a list of fragrances I'd like to get a better grip on. (For those who don't already know, Octavian is a perfumer, perfume historian, and writer who is not only able to detect specific notes/accords — both natural and synthetic — he's able to situate the perfumes in the context and history of other perfumes. He is amazing.) I've got my own list of perfumes, but I'm curious, are there any beloved perfumes you're holding onto that you know nothing about, even after scouring the Internet and books?

Tell me what they are, send me a 1 ml sample (if you have one) that I will forward to Octavian (is that not the best name ever?), and we'll both work on figuring out what the heck is in your beloved. Thank you!

Flashback: Perfumed Fans ("évantails") Used to Be a Thing

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm as interested in perfume culture as I am in perfume itself. So imagine my delight when I was reading one of my favorite blogs, World of Wonder, and came across this awesome excerpt from Arlene Dahl's 1965 advice book, unfortunately titled Always Ask a Man: Arlene Dahl's Key to Femininity.*

Mother to actor Lorenzo Lamas, this once Hollywood star-turned-advice- columnist/astrologer-paper-doll-maker (to read more about her, check out Bradford Shell Hammer's blog) provided a "useful" list detailing what Chic Is and What Chic Is Not.

Let's start with What Chic Is Not. It's not "Diamonds at breakfast." (Damn! I guess I'll have to clutch my pearls instead over my morning eggs and bacon.) It's also not "More than three colors in any ensemble" or "An aggressive manner." Among the things she thinks Chic Is: "A gay dinner hat."  "Taupe." And intriguingly — "Perfumed fans."

Really? In 1965? Perfumed fans seem like a thing from Louis XV's Perfumed Court era. A perfumed fan is also something I imagine a Southern Belle, back in the day, fluttering in front of her face while sitting in a swing on a plantation veranda. 

But I'm trying to imagine someone in Arlene Dahl's time (picture Joan Holloway from Mad Men, which is set in the early-to-mid-1960s) pulling out a perfumed fan! When would you do this? Wouldn't it look weird and unmodern?

Internet-trawling for perfumed fans netted some interesting information, though.

Perfume Intelligence tells us that from the 17th century onward, until perfume atomizers made their appearance in the second half of the 19th century, fans scented with perfume were one way of assuring you were in a fragrant environment. In the early part of the 20th century, many French perfume houses, including Rigaud and Parfums de Rosine, advertised their perfumes on perfumed fans. (See pics below.)

After the atomizer came out, perfumed fans became a means of advertising anything from funeral parlors (!) to champagne. I find it so interesting that perfume was once a vehicle for advertising homely, completely unrelated services and product. In my post on perfume nips, I discovered that even telephone companies sent out little plastic boxes of perfume nips to their customers! It's hard to imagine someone now handing you perfume as a means to sell you — I don't know — car insurance or something.

If you have any anecdotes or stories or information about perfumed fans and their use, do tell!

Perfume Quote of the Day: Italo Calvino's "The Name, The Nose"

"Epigraphs in an undecipherable language, half their letters rubbed away by the sand-laden wind: this is what you will be, O parfumeries, for the noseless man of the future. You will still open your doors to us, your carpets will still muffle our footsteps, you will receive us in your jewel-box space, with no jutting corners, the walls of lacquered wood, and shopgirls or patronnes, colorful and soft as artificial flowers, will let their plump arms, wielding atomizers, graze us, or the hem of their skirts, as they stand tip-toe on stools, reaching upwards. But the phials, the ampules, the jars with their spire-like or cut-glass stoppers will weave in vain from shelf to shelf their network of harmonies, assonances, dissonances, counterpoints, modulations, cadenzas: our deaf nostrils will no longer catch the notes of their scale. We will not distinguish musk from verbena: amber and mignonette, bergamot and bitter-almond will remain mute, sealed in the calm slumber of their bottles. When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible."

Italo Calvino, "The Name, the Nose" from Under the Jaguar Sun

 

Please discuss, perfumaniacs. What does this mean to you?