hortus conclusus

One of my favorite moment moments in modern fragrance history is the great Spicy Oriental boom of the Eighties. These fragrances were awesome, in my opinion; Opium, Cinnabar, Shalimar, Poison, Coco —these ladies didn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thought of them. They were huge, domineering, impossible to mistake for another, and were so powerful that they launched the biggest backlash ever—the ultimate domination of ‘quiet’, ‘linear’ fragrances like CK One and Bulgari’s Thé Vert . What nobody seemed to realize, or at least care about,  at the time is that these fragrances were singing the swan song of the great operatic fragrance a la big perfume house. Since then, most new releases—even from the great houses of Chanel and Guerlain—have been nice at times, but never as complex, dense, and intriguingly impossible to completely understand as these powerful creatures of their time. Of course, niche perfumers still create grand fragrances  with lots going on all the time, b...

I chatted with my friend José last night about scent; His seven year old daughter, he says, spends hours and hours in the bathroom, ‘making perfume’. I told him the next time they came over for dinner we could smell perfume together and talk about their compostion. He says she is very interested in chemistry; the parents are both extremely talented scientists—maybe she could become a parfumier ; ) Then Jose and I got to talking about his memories with cologne. He says Shalimar and Tribú remind him of old lovers. Chanel no. 5 is his mother. His father, a wealthy and powerful Mexican artist and politician, is YSL . He himself wears Lacoste . His wife wears nothing. My dear friend Julie, 7 ½ months pregnant, wandered around the party smelling amazingly exotic, yet intensely familiar; It took me awhile to figure out that she was wearing Sensuous , one of my very favorites. It smelled fabulous on her, and it was a very cool experience to smell it on someone else besides me—I’ve almos...

First of all, the bottle is gorgeous, and it's hard to describe the attachment I have formed to it. Something about the way the little glass ridges feel in my hand--it makes the bottle feel almost oily, but in a good way, like I'm caressing some smooth, well-oiled alien skin. The color is perfect too; it is not pink nor copper nor yellow, but somewhere in between all of them, with a sort of mid-century blocky rose gold cap. Mine stays right on my bedside table, and I find myself admiring its form from time to time. Granted, it's no exotic bottle, but something about this perfume just does it for me. We first fell in love two summers ago, as I wandered the Bloomingdale's on Sixth Ave. in search of a gift to present some Brazilian hosts I had never met, who were putting us up for my brother's wedding to one of their nieces. Well, we didn't fall in love at Bloomingdales ; we had to get to know each other better. But despite my better judgem...