Another name that's truly mysterious is the Le Galion scent. I'm sure not many of you readers remember Le Galion. Le Galon was indeed an important perfumery in France at one point, and produced some legendary scents, notable "Sortilege," which is perhaps their most famous. The success of Le Galion was guaranteed by the fact they made top drawer scents, using the finest ingredients, packaged them beautifully, but sold them at a fraction of the cost of the Guerlains, the Carons, the Patous, and the other scents of nobility, thus allowing those of restricted means to indulge in truly luxurious scents without guilt. One of their perfumes was called "Snob." Now--that--in itself--is pretty funny. The perfume was an attempt to copy "Joy." Many women wore it religiously, telling everyone it was Joy, as it did indeed behave and react in a very similar fashion to Joy: This had for effect that it became much in demand in the US, as "Joy," for many, many years was *the* perfume an aspirational american woman *had* to wear--as it was heavily marketed in the US--more aggressively than it ever was in France, as "The Costliest Perfume in the World," which, in fact, it was, until it was upstaged in 1964 by Bal a Versailles, which was slightly more expensive than Joy. Cheating with Snob, which cost about 1/4th the price of Joy, was creating a problem for Jean Patou. To solve this problem, the then very powerful house of Patou secretly purchased the rights to the name "Snob," which is why you might sometimes see it listed in the exhaustive scent lists that include every single fragrance ever made by a house in question, in this case Patou, though Patou never had a perfume called "Snob." When the house of Le Galion was served papers by the French Court, ordering them to remove all product from international markets baring the name "Snob," they had a very strange way of handling that request: They continued to make "Snob," and sell it, except that they changed its name to the very logic defying "Cub." How ever are we meant to make sense of the choice of a word like "Cub" for a perfume--especially one as pink, flowery and elegant as "Snob?" The *only* thing I can figure is that they were referencing the word "Cube," which, I suppose, would be a reference to Cubist Art, then somewhat in vogue. Being French, I imagine they never sought to envision how what they must have imagined to be a clever choice of spelling would be viewed in an anglophone culture--and couldn't possibly have known that the word "Cub" in english means "baby bear." This is why, to this day, though they are rare, you can still find bottles of Le Galion labeled "Cub," which, in reality, contain "Snob." There was also a transitional time when the two existed side by side on perfumery shelves--& I remember that time: Le Galion had a tiny perfumery in rue de la Paix I believe--I was about 5 or 6 years old, and my mother and I went to this perfumery--and I was *Much* amused by the fact that bottles were on display with these funny names on them: That evening I told my sister: "Mother took me to a perfumery today and they had two perfumes called "Snob" and "Cub." (Both my sister and I have been perfectly bilingual French/English our whole lives, so both words were processed from the angles of both languages) I remember her saying: "It's not true! It does not exist, perfumes which are called "Snob" and "Cub!" and then we had a fight over it.This interchange took place 40 years ago. Recently, I saw on e-bay a bottle of "Cub," and, just to prove to my sister, and to remind her of a memory of our youth, I bought one of "Snob," and one of "Cub," and gave them to her as a gift--and we laughed and laughed.
