The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent

While I still lived at my parents’, my black bevelled bottle of Van Cleef stayed stashed in Jon’s bathroom to circumvent the paternal ban. The smell of it on my clothing was a way for me to linger in Jon’s aura after I’d gone back home to the suburbs, and then, after that summer, to my campus room. Being eighteen with a hopeless crush on my best friend was a dull, delectable pain I sharpened by wallowing in his smells. Every scrap of the Van Cleef carried a bit of him and of our time together. The bitter herbal aroma of the joints we’d puff on while discussing Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime before checking out the local bands. The whiff of soap on his neck when he shaved, as I was leaning next to him over his sink to paint my face on after he’d art-directed my evening’s get-up. The cigarette smoke that lingered in his clothes and hair. The weathered leather jacket I’d snuggle up against as we tottered out of a club at 3 a.m. to have potato latkes at Ben’s Deli. The funky, dark, animal waft of his sheets when I woke up on the box spring of his bed – he was crashing out on the mattress he’d pulled on to the floor. By that time I’d graduated from writing the music column for the college paper to freelancing with the two local rock magazines: the older editors were still into the likes of progressive rock, heavy metal or the local Quebec music scene, so I covered all the punk bands that came to Montreal. I sometimes spent the night with one of the musicians I’d interviewed, kids barely older than I on their first foreign tour sharing rooms with their roadies. Then Jon sulked, but not much.

Though it was meant for men and worn by all my friends, Van Cleef and Arpels was the first scent I truly felt was mine. It marked my belonging to a tribe at last. It marked my belonging to Jon: made me his, and made him mine, and made me him, more than sex would ever have done. It also marked my final emancipation from the belief in femininity. Up to then, there’d always been a girl who had It more than me, that elusive quality of really-being-a-woman – Geneviève, Sylvie or the manager of that perfume shop on the Avenue de l’Opéra. Perfume had been the potion that had promised it could transform me into that woman. Now, like those outfits so camp they could actually get the curvy teenage girl I was mistaken for a cross-dresser – I’d drawn the ultimate consequences of the teachings of The Female Eunuch – wearing the Van Cleef finally drove home the lesson I’d learned from Germaine Greer as a pre-teen: masculinity and femininity, as opposed to being a man, a woman or any combination thereof, were just a matter of signs. And signs could be played with, believed in just enough to derive pleasure from them. They weren’t an identity to be caught up in, yet never felt adequate to. The Waft was the ultimate emblem of my transgression: provocative, invasive, but invisible. People would see a girl and look for the guy who must be lurking behind her. During those heady days in Montreal, fierce in style and intellect, set loose by the crashing chords of punk, I discovered I could be both.

When I sought out Michael thirty years later to ask him how it was that the Van Cleef came into our lives, he answered that he’d been the one to introduce it. It was his return to male fragrances after wearing a mix of Bal à Versailles and 4711, he said, and you couldn’t invent that: the boy who introduced me to olfactory gender-bending wore my mother’s secret perfume …

Van Cleef and Arpels stretched the spectrum of my olfactory tastes from the shameless floral femininity of Chloé to the toughness of leather and tobacco, which is probably why, twenty years later, I’d slip so pleasurably into the work of one of the first female perfumers, and one of the ballsiest of either gender. Germaine Cellier had already straddled that divide back in the 40s.

With Fracas, Germaine Cellier introduced two partners in crime who’d go on to spawn a whole dynasty of divas: orange blossom and tuberose. Think Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive: the untapped sexual potency of a fresh-faced ingénue hooked up with the simmering hysteria of an ivory-skinned femme fatale … Cellier also butched up the simpering violet by slapping it with a leather glove (Jolie Madame by Balmain) and invented a whole new perfume family by pouring an overdose of galbanum into Vent Vert (also by Balmain). But she never raised the stakes so much as with her 1944 Bandit. Conceived in the midst of the German occupation, it is the toughest fragrance ever offered to women; the olfactory equivalent of the street-smart, give-as-good-as-they-get dames of 40s movies. In fact, the blonde, couture-clad, potty-mouthed Cellier could’ve probably taught a couple of bitchy comebacks to Barbara Stanwyck.

When Fracas nudged me towards her snarling big sister Bandit, I was thrust back to my punk dandy days. Van Cleef had carried some of Bandit’s kick-ass genes, and that toughness is what drew me in. But what kept me interested were the film-noirish twists and turns of Bandit’s plot: a languid, jasmine, tuberose and gardenia heart, caught up between the earthy green galbanum and bitter artemisia of the top notes and the dark, smoky-leathery base notes – castoreum with its ink and black chocolate facets, the burnt liquorice of isobutyl quinoline, oak moss and smoky vetiver. As though Fracas had slipped on her lover’s leather trench coat to slink off on some secret mission. A crawl through a garden, wet earth and grass sticking to her stockings; a tar-roof shed where she shares black-market American cigarettes with a hunted man. Is that a gun in his pocket or …? Bandit may be an outlaw, but she’s no femme fatale; in a pinch, she’s as good as any man. In a clinch, she’ll stub out her cigarette, take that kiss, and growl, ‘It’s even better when you help.’

Bandit isn’t for wusses, which is probably why it was made for women. But if it were launched today, it couldn’t possibly end up on the feminine side of the aisle. In the mainstream, masculine and feminine scents are not unlike some species of insects where the male and the female look as though they don’t even belong to the same species: their evolution has made them diverge so sharply that several classic women’s fragrances would smell downright hairy-chested to today’s consumers.

Fruit, flowers and vanilla for girls; soap, lavender and wood for boys. So obvious it seems nature-ordained. After all, girls like picking flowers and boys like to whittle sticks, right? Scrap the genetic arguments: men wear floral essences in many cultures – rose in the Middle East, jasmine in India. And they wore them in the West up to the 18th century: perfumes being mainly custom blends, there was no distinction between masculine and feminine fragrances before Marie-Antoinette’s delicately scented head tumbled into a basket.

The great divide yawned open in the early 19th century when upper-class men ditched their coloured and embroidered silks to adopt the black suit as a uniform, leaving it up to their women-folk to showcase the family wealth. Fragrance was contrary to the new bourgeois capitalist ethics, a conspicuous waste of precious materials that evaporated as they were used, as Pliny the Elder was already grumbling all the way back in the Roman Empire. It was also deceitful, suspected of hiding a lack of hygiene or lewd ulterior motives and, as such, clashed with the puritanical values of the Industrial Age. Men were meant to smell clean: the family breadwinner wasn’t out to seduce. Though there were, alongside the non-gendered colognes, a few lotions, vinegars, hair cosmetics and aftershaves designed for men, the ranges were limited. They did, however, establish what was acceptable for men: lavender, citrus, aromatic herbs, moss, leather …

The gendering of fragrance was also a consequence of the industrialization of perfumery. Once products started having original names rather than generic ones like ‘Eau de Chypre’ or ‘Eau de Cologne’, they had to be geared towards a specific clientele. In 1904, Guerlain would put out Mouchoir de Monsieur (‘gentleman’s handkerchief’) to complement its Voilette de Madame, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Men mostly had to make do with what they bought in barbershops, pharmacies or department stores: haute perfumery wasn’t meant for them at all.

It was only in the late 19th century that a fragrance family we’ve come to think of as specifically masculine was introduced, the fougère, (the ‘fern’) named after Houbigant’s Fougère Royale, believed to be the first fragrance in history to use synthetic materials. Fougères are built on a framework of bergamot (an aromatic, peppery citrus), geranium (a rounded note from the rose family, but fresher), oak moss (earthy, green, mossy) and a synthetic called coumarin, initially extracted from the tonka bean (but made much more cheaply through another process), which smells of tobacco, almond and hay. They often incorporate aromatic notes such as lavender and therefore fall within more masculine olfactory codes.

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