Jaime B's Blog
Re: Which bottle made you into a collector?
by
on 25th August 2008 at 05:59 AM (1034 Views)
I have been collecting (I now realize in retrospect) for a long time. And along the way, I thought there were markers. There were times before I had ever heard of Basenotes that I realized I had stuff that most people had never heard of. There was the time when I first realized that I had already amassed more bottles than most other Basenoters; until that time I had unconsciously assumed that most people on this board had hundreds of bottles!
But I think the real indicator came relatively recently. A while ago, I purchased Parfums DelRae Eau Illuminée. I had seen it in a small boutique that sold mostly antiques and home decor items. They had all four of the DelRae line, and I sniffed them all. Gradually, I realized that there was some kind of genius in the nose that created these, Michel Roudnitska, the son of another perfumer, Edmond Roudnitska. It was a while before I picked up my second fragrance from the DelRae line, Bois de Paradis. After that it was a foregone conclusion that I would buy the other two, Début and Amoureuse. And I did, as I knew I would. Then I realized that I had bought an entire line (albeit a very small one) of fragrances: first, because I loved every one of them; second, because I knew I would wear them all; and third, because I knew that the nose who created them was a true talent. Most of you know that this is the same nose who created Noir Épices for the Frédéric Malle Éditions de Parfums line. [His father Edmond created Parfum de Thérèse, now also in the F. Malle line, originally conceived as Prune, but not marketed under that name when he created it because it was too far ahead of its time.]
Somehow, that experience of discovering, appreciating, and buying all of that line brought me to the realization that I was a collector; and that this was so because I knew with certainty that I would eventually hunt down with the tenacity of a bloodhound any scent that I believed in some private, interior sense was a masterpiece. I have picked up many others that were not real masterpieces (some of them pretty far from that exalted designation), but those don't define my quest. I don't dine every night on gourmet food, and in just the same way, I don't always wear masterpiece scents. That's not the point. The point is that I regard scents as part of living, a clearly central part of it for me, and that I am now in some inescapable sense, a collector. Thanks, Michel Roudnitska, for that realization. You may not be the greatest nose that ever lived, but you're pretty high up in my book, and your oeuvre finally made me realize just how much scent means to me.
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