by Chandler Burr, 17 January 2008
Details of how you can obtain the book, as well as the chance to discuss this extract can be found at the end.
I wrote this section first to emphasize the constant struggle I go through trying to put in just the right number of molecular names. A delicate balance, and I wanted to say something about what my editors will and won’t allow in The Times. I lose battles there every day. And second because I wanted to communicate what smelling the raw materials is like. Near the end of the editing process, George decided we simply already had enough on raw materials in the book, so he asked me to take it out.
Writing about synthetics in the Times column has been something we've had to balance, but only due to intellectual block. I'm instinctively, maybe compulsively, into it; at the same time, there's a right-time-and-place question. It's Sunday morning, you're leafing through The Times, and your eye hits 1-ethoxyethoxy-cyclododecane. Does this work? I ask people, and I get yes ("I don't know what that is, but it makes you reconsider the stuff"), I get, sourly, no. I've always admired the way the classical music critic Alex Ross deftly manages the equivalent of sprinkling amyl allyl glycolate into his texts. He leavens metaphorical description with technical detail. "The music is centered on a lullaby-like melody in G major," he writes about one piece, "and it has the atmosphere of a motionless summer day. The vocal line ends on a B, and afterward the same note is held for two slow beats by the violas, as if they were holding the hands of the singer who came from their ranks." You may have studied music and understand the tonal specifics—a major third, a non-resolve to the tonic. You may not. But Ross gives you a peek at the blueprints, the music's wiring, I'm giving the wiring of the scents, and I suppose my feeling is that that, all by itself, adds.
If you want to smell materials, go down 3rd Avenue to Prince Street in Nolita, turn right, then right again on Elizabeth Street and look left. At number 233 Elizabeth you'll see Le Labo. This perfume outfit, run by two young French guys, Eddie and Fabrice. You come in, sit at the long bar, and in front of you, lined up like tiny vodkas and liqueurs, sit the materials—the beautiful lines of glass bottles before glass bottles, and Eddie or Fabrice, bartending, cheerfully gets down a collection of them for you. As customers walk in and out, buying the perfumes behind you, you sit at the bar for hours smelling the naturals and synthetics they have.
Some afternoons I smell a group of them blind, one by one, trying to get the character, neurally imprinting the smell.
Rose is rose. (Fabrice leans over to smell your touche, you hold it up to his nose, and you both discuss this rose.) Interestingly, people don't realize how deeply rose is soap. I love rose. It is a strange, soapy smell washed (depending on where it's from and how it's done) in rubber, leather, mint, and/or motor oil.
Jasmin. Le Labo has one jasmine that is lighter, less animalic than most I've ever smelled, hardly any indoles, but that's unusual, and not representative. Jasmine is a sado-masochistic, slothful, dirty little flower. You can (and everyone does) dress it up and make it presentable before sending it out in public, but basically the stuff in its natural state is an unwashed beast wearing dirty underwear and stinking from its armpits. Jasmine is a flower that has an asshole, and you can smell it. It's the indoles.
Orange flower (this one is an absolute, made with steam). I've always hated orange flower almost as much as I hate vetiver. (I realize you're not supposed to say you hate vetiver. People get very upset. But there it is. I have no trouble recognizing an objectively technically beautiful vetiver scent like Guerlain's, but personally I don't like these two materials). Orange blossom has a thick, dark hairy chest and a thick beard, and you smell its armpits, which are hairy and unwashed. People in general have no idea what flower essences and absolutes actually smell like. They expect a prom queen; they get a truck driver on an overnight haul, but the strange thing about orange flower is that it also has an astringent scent built in somewhere. The truck driver, not able to shower, has tried to cover up the armpits with a slather of drugstore deodorant. Orange flower absolute is not for the faint of heart; it's a brutal smell, with big meaty hands and a cup of window cleaner.
Muguet (lily of the valley) smells like a child's concept of the way a flower smells. The kid thinks: sweet, clear, light, pure. A simplistic, Crayola Crayon flower. Nice, but not particularly interesting.
Ylang ylang smells like lighter fluid. A flower of vaporous petroleum that jets into the air like a sheet of flame waiting to ignite.
The smell of iris is, as exactly as possible, the smell of very dry hay in a wood barn.
Neroli I don't like. Neroli is also bitter orange blossoms. (Only the bitter species is used.) It took me (in the usual idiosyncratic way we learn things in life) years to figure out that when perfumers said "orange blossom" they meant hot distilled orange blossoms and when they said "neroli" they meant cold distilled orange blossoms. And then another bit of time to fix in my head that petit grain is the stems and leaves of the bitter orange tree.
Petitgrain is a hardcore pornographic rape scent set in a forest. I hate petitgrain. It's a violent smell. It took years for me to remember that olibanum is the wood of the tree from which you bleed incense resin. (It smells like every sleek, expensive modern furniture store in the world. I don't know why.)
Heliotropin comes in a powder. It is a smell as wonderful as a cool down quilt on a spring day. It smells of the purest elementary school glue, a powder of tonka beans. It is so beautiful.
Star anise smells exactly like licorice.
Le Labo has a patchouli that is superlative. You sit at the bar and drink it in. The smell, metaphorically, of fine rough gray silk.
There is always a surprise on smelling materials again. You can know them and you forget and you inhale and you think: wait… I always forget that star anise smells exactly like licorice. I forget that rosemary smells like turpentine. I forget that cedar smells like a dessert. I forget how wonderful and soft sandalwood is. I forget every single time how deeply and viscerally I love 3,4-(methylene dioxy)-1,3-benzodioxole-5-benzaldehyde, which you get as a white crystallized powder sitting in its bottle—it's called heliotropin when sold as a scent material, Eddie will get it down for you—a molecule that smells of the purest elementary school glue, a cocaine of tonka beans.
I forget how utterly wonderful cis-3 hexenol is, the sweetest freshly-mown grass, grass as candy, summer in a small glass vial. I forget how much Nepalese villages smell redolently like Haitian vetiver (a vetiver from Robertet that I smelled at Le Labo one afternoon; I smelled a vetiver from Réunion at Symrise a few days later that was more mushrooms in a dark Chinese storage room). I forget that cumin smells like men's underarms. That ambrette seeds smell like China in the process of modernizing: concrete dust, construction, car exhaust. That blackcurrant smells, famously, to around 20% of people like cat piss and to others—to me—like your cat's anus. I think everyone, always, until the instant that they smell it again forgets the raw, pounding power of civet. Which is literally a scent from a gland in the anus of a wild Chinese cat, or at least was until the real stuff was made completely illegal and all civet became synthetic. (A friend at a Big Boy gave me some of the real stuff. I have no idea how he got it.) That the different qualities of lemon give utterly different scents, the low-grade giving you this vile acidic citric shit, the most expensive ones giving you a glistening liquid lacquered cool luminescence. Same for bergamot. The best stuff is better somehow. A grapefruit is to a really, really super-expensive grapefruit essence what a lime is to the lime zest whipped cream at Restaurant 44 at 6th Avenue and 44th.
I forget how bored I am by cinnamon, a mono-dimensional, obvious smell. I forget what a powerful effect the synthetic allyl caproate has: It is delightfully mesmerizing at first, just slightly tropical, it makes you eagerly gulp it down and then almost instantly it turns grotesquely and alarmingly repulsive, sick and twisted—and yet you can't stop. It smells, to be precise, like a slice of melon that has been urinated on. And still you want it. It gets into every orifice. Allyl caproate is wildly strange. It is the guiltiest of molecules.
I forget how complex scents can be. Le Labo had a Robertet essence of birchwood on their shelves, and I smelled it one day. Birchwood, which is simply an essence taken from the wood of the tree, smells exactly like a Chevron garage: It smells of old motor oil, a whiff of gasoline (the scent washed into the garage from the pumps just outside), old rubber (the red rubber air hose and the stacks of tires), leather of the old cracked seats in the Ford Ltd, and the cigarette butts thrown in dangerous proximity to the petrochemical film covering everything. The only part of the garage birchwood doesn't contain is the smell of metal, but it takes you a moment to notice that.
Why does the industry play down synthetics in fragrances? I've seen plenty of note listings for fragrance for heliotrope, but
never for 3,4-(methylene dioxy)-1,3-benzodioxole-5-benzaldehyde
For the simplest reason: They don’t want to frighten off customers. Customers can frighten in three ways. First, they’re “all naturals” freaks who think that synthetics are “bad” in some theological way. Or second, they’re romantics who want to believe that all perfume is made of roses and daffodils and smiling bunny rabbits. Or third, they’re pissed off by not knowing what the hell “methyl dihydrojasmonate” is or smells like. Any or all of these things make perfume marketers nervous. I sympathize with the third reason. Not the other two.
Should every perfume lover make the journey to LeLabo?
Hell yeah. It’s a terrific collection.
As well as being the New York Times first perfume critic, Chandler Burr is also the author of two fragrance books - The Emperor of Scent, and The Perfect Scent.
Discuss article | 
Print | 
|
Useful Links Read, View, Friend, Follow |
Get in touch 
|
