Sweet smell of excess
Sophia Hesselgren
The nose apologises: he has a cold. ‘And for me, losing my smell is like ... ’ his arms hover in front of him — ‘... being blind. Blind!’ We are gathered in the first-floor salon of the Lalique shop on Sloane Street in London, 20 ‘spray and pray’ perfume counter girls (and guys) and I. We are here to be infused with the spirit of the new Lalique fragrance, Le Parfum, one of the autumn’s big perfume launches.
Roja Dove, haute perfumer with a hiphop frontman’s line in bling, is the man doing the infusing. He is bedecked with gold: chunky flashing rings, heavy chains, a white shirt festooned with gold hundredsand-thousands and overblown flower shapes. As a medical research student at Cambridge, he bombarded the venerated house of Guerlain with ‘thousands’ of letters asking if he could train with them. Robert Guerlain eventually acceded, seeing that such determination would be better harnessed within his company than outside it, and Roja remained with Guerlain for 19 years. Now he is a freelance ‘professeur des parfums’, with his very own haute perfumerie at the Urban Retreat in Harrods and a client list that is as closely guarded as a state secret.
Roja (pronounced Roger) introduces the new product, one that he firmly believes will become a classic. The bottle is glass, simple and square — these are supposedly the most difficult to manufacture, given that they have to be flawless — with a replica of the ‘Masque de Femme’ by René Lalique in the top. It comes in a very smart red and black box, which Roja opens with a flourish. ‘And sitting inside like a jewel, you have the bottle nestling,’ he says in an almost-French accent, and points out the silk barbichette wound around the top.
Behind me, I hear an intake of breath. ‘Beautiful!’ says Mandy from Scentsations in Troon. ‘Beautiful.’ Fragrance is a strange and complex beast in that, with one whiff, it can transport you to a different time and place: the musty medical smell that reminds you of rooting around your grandmother’s attic, say, or the sticky floral aroma that conjures up an adolescent summer spent doing GCSEs drenched in Impulse and fear. You don’t get that buying a pair of shoes. As Roja says, ‘Fragrance acts like a cat burglar — it picks the lock that unleashes memories.’ It works on the most primitive part of the brain. The word perfume comes from the Latin per (through) and fumare (to smoke). It describes, originally, how man, once he’d become civilised enough to stop sacrificing his fellow man/animal, communicated with his god or gods. He burnt gum resins: frankincense, myrrh, benzoin. And with the aromatic smoke that ascended went his prayers.
Now, of course, perfume is a multi-billionpound industry that has less to do with communicating with gods and more to do with communicating with the opposite (or, indeed, same) sex. ‘Marketing bullshit’ is how Roja describes it, which is itself quite a good line in marketing. Multinational companies such as L’Oréal (whose perfume sales in the first six months of this year came to €7.163 billion), Procter and Gamble and Coty (which bought Unilever in March for $800 million) between them release eaux de toilette numbering well into the hundreds every year.
A common tactic is to launch a fragrance on the back of any celebrity — and I use the word loosely — willing to sell their name. The bandwagon is heaving: David and Victoria Beckham, Sarah Jessica Parker, Shania Twain, Donald Trump all have an ‘eau de moi’, as does Sir Cliff Richard. His fragrance for women is called ‘Miss You Nights’, which makes for some fairly traumatic mental images, at least in my head.
These marketing-driven fragrances mean that customers end up buying a plastic or, if the star is sufficiently A-list, glass bottle with a synthetic frangipani/vanilla smelling substance for quite a lot more than it costs to produce. (Vanilla, incidentally, is a psychogenic aphrodisiac, meaning that whether it is consumed or sniffed the effect it has on the nervous system is one of intense pleasure; vanilla tincture made from the sweated seed pods of orchids in, for instance, Réunion island takes 18 months to two years to produce. The ICI version costs far less and is a by-product of newspaper pulp.) But then you have to factor in the amount that the celebrity was paid, and the nose, and the salaries of the people who come up with the stories because, while smell recalls associations and emotions, the world of perfume-selling evokes hopes and dreams through astoundingly breathless copy.
It’s no wonder, then, that such perfumes have a short shelf life. Once bought, they do not generally engender much loyalty. And thus another perfume joins the bland line-up in order to keep the coffers full.
Lalique’s new fragrance is aimed at a more sophisticated market. Dominique Ropion, the perfumer who created the ‘jus’ (the formula, pronounced ‘juice’), apparently had carte blanche on the components, and Roja is at pains to point out that he chose the best.
The ‘modern and quirky’ top notes of the fragrance, the ones that you smell when the perfume is first applied and that evaporate the most quickly, include bergamot, bay leaf and baies roses. Bergamot is the most expensive of citrus ingredients because 1,500 kilos of fruit, peeled, pithed and squeezed by hand, result in one litre of oil; baies roses, also known as pink peppercorns or red pepper, costs four times as much as gold bullion to produce — or did until it was commercially distilled. The heart of the fragrance is classical French: jasmine and heliotrope mean it is very floral, but the thing about white flowers such as jasmine is that they contain indole molecules — also found in musk — in order to attract bees to pollinate them. These molecules ‘are all about pure sex’, says Roja. ‘They give an animalistic, carnal smell — it’s like having your décolleté on show.’ The base is woody: patchouli, sandalwood, vanilla and tonka bean. Altogether, a nasal delight.
Roja shares more of his estimable knowledge about perfume — a potted history in seven and a half minutes — and some practical applications. Girls, you’ll love ’em. That you shouldn’t dab scent behind the ears, for instance: excretions from the sebaceous glands there can change the scent’s smell. Far better to put fragrance in the hollow of your collar bone, so you can inhale wafts of it (as can anyone who whispers sweet nothings in your ear), and on the back of the knee to leave a faint trace of scent, or sillage, behind you.
A common misconception is that you can’t smell more than three fragrances on a tour of department store perfume counters. You can, but the alcohol from freshly sprayed perfume will anaesthetise the back of the nose. Spray instead on paper spills (but beware: if it turns purple at the edge of the wetness, the paper has reacted with the chemicals in the perfume) and smell once the perfume has dried down. And whatever you do, don’t rub your wrists together after applying perfume: the heat from the friction ‘bruises’ the perfume. ‘Don’t do that, you’ll break its heart,’ is how Roja warns his customers. His audience giggles appreciatively.
We also discover the difference between eau de toilette (which is 3–8 per cent jus dissolved in alcohol), eau de parfum (7–14 per cent jus), and parfum (20–40 per cent jus). Of refreshing eau de toilette, 50 per cent will evaporate in a few minutes; another 30 per cent will evaporate after two to four hours. Parfum has the greatest staying power: 50 per cent will last all day. But used together, the eau de toilette and a dab of the perfume will produce a rounded, long-lasting fragrance.
Lalique’s signature scent costs £50 for the eau de toilette; the snazzy black lacquer box containing the parfum, a concentrated rich essence in a frosted, exquisite glass bottle — a René Lalique design, bien sûr — costs £495. £495? You know, Roja makes that sound very reasonable indeed.
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