Notes on Shoes Cake & Perfume

Perfume in Berlin: Who knew?

We went on a great trip to Berlin last year, and having done my homework beforehand I had two indigenous perfumeries on my list of places to track down. Here's a little report on the suprising things I found .... Berlin has two indigenous perfume lines with their own shops, Frau Tonis, near Check Point Charlie (Berlin!), a chic modern Perfumery with around 40 lovely original and quite natural smelling scents, a well-informed staff and many options at quite modest prices ... like samplers of 5 or 10 ml bottles, free Int'l shipping, 50 ml for 65Euros and 100 for 89Euros ..... They encourage you to layer their scents, which I found refreshing (ha ha). 

I walked out with a 4 ml sampler of four different scents: Seigneur (an Herbaceaus Leather) with notes of Mandarin, caraway, moss, nutmeg, violet, leather & patchouli;  Double Zero (an unusual combination of Fresh, Rich & Spicy): Vetiver, pine, lemon, sandalwood, musk, sage, lavender; Vamos (a woodsy herbal) Sandalwood, ginger, vetiver, resin, cumin ; Notre Temps (classic sparkling and feminine) bergamot, jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, vetiver, sandal wood & orange.  

 

Then there is Harry Lehman, in a very commercial neighborhood away from all of the Cultural Activities, but worth visiting for its sense of 1950's Berlin and 30-40 very inexpensive and varied scents, in a multitude of sizes. It turns out that Harry Lehman (Jr or III) composed a number of Frau Tonis' scents, so I was absolutely on the right track, finding 4 scents to buy at each place .......  do check out the scents (and prices!) on the translation of the German site I have linked, subtitled by them "Perhaps the Smallest Perfume Factory in the World".  They have been in business since the 1920's and in the same location since 1958! 

 

What I find particularly refreshing is the fact that all of these perfumes are MADE IN BERLIN, which means that they are not subject to the pesky IFRA rules and they have their own particular vibe, and seem to contain quite a lot of inexpensive natural ingredients, with prices to match, and none of these scents are available anywhere else! 

Thanksgiving in France with Cuir de Gardenia

I got my Christmas present to myself on Thanksgiving, three minis from Aftelier, and I had to open it!  Living in France, where we are not celebrating this wonderful American holiday, it took the place of a big dinner with friends. 

 

Cuir de Gardenia is the olfactory equivalent of a Murmuration of Starlings, shifting its shape over and over.  Deliberately conceived without top notes, on my skin it opens differently every time!  Sometimes it starts out with a blast of Castoreum, other times the Gardenia is up front, alternatively it can begin with some facet of either of these rich scents, or even a completely unified sensation where the two have melded completely.

Mandy's new Cuir de Gardenia joins Cepes Tuberose as a Perfume Surprise, and if you, like me, love the latter, you will probably love this new one too.  Once again she has succeeded again in divining a surprisingly perfect union of notes that do something together that no other perfume does.  

I will continue to play with my precious drops of this scent until my little bottle is depleted.  Hopefully she will continue to be able obtain these rare natural ingredients so that we can get more and more of this original creation! 

Roger Vivier: In the Footsteps of a Shoe God

The word Artist has become ubiquitous in the 21st Century.  Everyone is now an Artist, from Doctors to Scrapbookers, so I try to use it sparingly! Now you know I mean it when I state here that Roger Vivier was a true artist among designers.  Ever since I saw the sparkling show (by brilliant curatorial upstart Olivier Saillard) of his work ( Virgule, etc. in the Footsteps of Roger Vivier ) in Paris this month, I have been asking myself "What makes Vivier's work stand head and shoulders above other shoe designers?"  Maybe you have been wondering about this too, if not, maybe you should, not only because he changed fashionable shoes forever, but also because he was one of the 20th Century's greatest designers. 

Vivier was the consummate designer (great bio here) wildly imaginative yet refreshingly concrete, always working in three dimensions, with a particularly complex understanding of form and it's interaction with his materials.  He demanded more from himself than most shoe designers, creating each element of every silhouette himself, as well as the shoes themselves, including completely original, often counterintuitively shaped heels. 

By contrast, most shoe designers work out their designs in sketch form, the last shapes having been determined by committee according to the fashion moment, and shoe craftsmen and engineers in the factory work out the relationship of the shoe to the last and heel, to be worked on by the designer later.  Very few designers have had such an intimate relationship with the objects they create as Vivier had, functioning on so many levels simultaneously. 

Cristobal Balenciaga and Charles James, Vivier's contemporaries and the two great fashion formalists of the 20th century, made their reputations by sheathing the human body underneath their clothes in independent forms,  almost using bodies as hangers for their wonderful works.  A shoe designer doesn't have this luxury, as the relationship of shoes to feet is inescapable, and there is a great temptation either to decorate or minimize the fashionable shoe forms of the day as a consequence.  By contrast, even Vivier's Minimal shoes seem Maximal, as each line, shape, and material is pushed to the edge of its capability.

The two great shoe innovators of the 20th Century, Vivier and Salvatore Ferragamo, have in common their completely original approaches to form and materials, as well as being hands on designers and craftsmen, but Ferragamo's approach seems very grounded in in craft, whereas Vivier is reaching for the stars.  Ferragamo has long been a household word, with a large family to carry on his work, while Vivier, originally hidden behind the Christian Dior and Delman labels, was a one man band.  He was worshipped by designers and fashion hounds throughout his long career, but only came to prominence when his legacy was acquired by Diego Delle Valle in 2000, continuing his work and aesthetic with the designer Bruno Frisoni.  Frisoni is one of many excellent designers working today who are are more followers than leaders.  

I first saw Vivier's lasts (the wooden forms that shoes are made on) at the wonderful Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto (who mounted their own Vivier exhibit earlier this year) in the early 90's, and they completely blew my mind.  Take a look at the contrast here between a Ferragamo and a Vivier last ....... The Ferragamo was something I could actually imagine as a young shoe designer, a good solid last for a frankly wearable shoe, while the Vivier lasts seem like they were shaped by a supernatural being.  The wildly refined wooden last with its extraordinarily intricate form changes and edges was a revelation to me.   Take a look at how each last has a completely different focus .... the first one has a full toe area, the toe in the second last is very narrowed down in every direction, and the third (the masterful Vivier touch) has an asymetrical angled toe which extends one of its sharp edges into the body of the shoe! 

Vivier had the ability to distill each moment of time and fashion directly into his work.  His work in the 30's and 40's is not yet visionary, but when he collaborates with Christian Dior in 1953 to help him fully express the post-war ultra feminine New Look, something clicks and his work changes shoe silhouettes forever.  He then collaborates with Yves St Laurent in 1965 and comes up with the famous Belle de Jour shoe, named a couple of years after its creation when it was worn by housewife/call girl Catherine Deneuve in the Louis Malle film in 1967. It so perfectly evoked the spirit of its time that it became the most copied shoe of the 60's, if not of all time, and 50 pairs a day flew out of his shop. 

Fashion silhouettes had become straightened out and elongated, and his shoe reflected this new attitude.  A symphony of squares, it is one of his most gravity bound creations.  Starting with the chunky heel I would lay you odds that he originated, mirrored by the square toe he definitely invented, echoed by the square "Pilgrim" buckle and squared inner line of the shoe, it was something a Modern Woman could actually run in. 

If he didn't actually create the Stilletto heel (there are differing opinions) he certainly pushed it to its limit by manipulation in myriad ways that no one else could ever have figured out, then he did a complete turnaround in 1965 with the Belle de Jour shoe as the anti-Stilletto.  It seems to me a typical Vivier move to explore every facet of a tall skinny heel, then abandon it never to look back.  An interviewer asked Woody Allen which of his films is his favorite, and he said whichever he was working on at the moment, everything else was already finished.  I can sense the same spirit in Vivier's work, each phase has his complete attention and whole-hearted commitment, then he is onto the next thing that stimulates him.  He had so many ideas, along with the means to express and realize them, he just kept them coming.  Look at the variations in this drawer, I can just see his designer's mind working, turning the shoe and its buckle (it was originally simply called "The Buckle Shoe") every which way .....

The first thing that distinguish a Roger Vivier shoe is its sculptural quality: the ultra refinement of its silhouette. This intensely refined form has the quality of movement, there isn't a static centimeter on any Vivier shoe, and they almost have a built in sense of perspective.  They seem to be vanishing into a horizon line, perhaps into or out of moments of our our lives in his shoes.  Their Beauty Intensity Quotient (BIQ ~ a term I just coined to fit this subject :-) is extremely high.  Like the high notes that shatter glass, they are so animated and have such strong personalities, you can feel the vibration of almost every shoe buzzing inside their glass cases.  They are also the result of an exotic aesthetic that reflects all of fashion history through its lens and focuses it on the moment the shoe was created. 

As fashion icon and current Vivier muse Ines de la Fressange aptly says in the video linked here, "Each shoe elicits an emotion, perhaps this is the role of fashion."

Here are three shoes that personify Roger Vivier to me.  The first hot pink beauty has an extraordinarily animated silhouette, at once suggesting the 17th Century and the 1950's streamlined shapes of Raymond Loewy.  The shape of the heel evokes to me the court shoes of Louis XIV, which had to have their center of gravity moved in to support the foot in the absence of metal shanks, and thanks to shanks, Vivier could turn the heel outward (it was called the goat's hoof heel), while the hot pink color could even be a wink at Louis' red heels.  Then the visual date stamp of the shoe abruptly shifts to the 50's in its fluid grace, and the undeniable Vivier mark is made upon them by the dipping interior line intensified by punctured petal shapes threaded with a rather casual bow, and the shaping of its knife sharp asymmetrical toe.  Detail detail detail, I can see his mind working, leaving nothing unaddressed in the design of this shoe until it cannot be perfected any further.  Et voila, an iconic Vivier! 

The second shoe is a wildly embellished coral Maharahni number that doesn't sacrifice any of the integrity of its design to its fervid decoration.  Again it combines the aesthetics of the 18th century and the 1950's with a liberal sprinkling of 1001 Arabian Nights, with its confined turned up Aladdin slipper toe.  This shoe is literally dripping with jewels that are actually dangling off its surface!  Impractical, yes, but extraordinarily animated and exciting. The tone on tone coralness of the shoe is something else that intensifies the vibrancy of this shoe and keeps it in the realm of perfect taste and harmony. 

Contrast the coral confection with the purity of this green velvet pump.  Since he didn't have to make allowances for the crunchy decorative beading, Vivier could shape the shoe more intricately so we can see the little curve above the same confined Aladdin toe calling our attention to its remarkable shape (shared with Ferragamo and often copied) then the inner line of the shoe undulates ever so slightly to intensify our experience of the green green green plush velvet surface, finally exiting at the curve of the back of the heel in one seamless line with the rather Empire heel whose surface seems to join the ground in a perfect arc. 

There is not one straight centimeter in either the silk or the velvet shoe, while the crunchy jeweled shoe is all stops and starts through its embellishment, masterfully choreographed by Vivier.        

With his prodigious output throughout 50 years, the eye and hand of a sculptor, and laserlike focus on every detail of design and construction, no one person has had more of an effect on the world of shoe design.  As Manolo Blahnik proclaimed to me (name drop alert!) at one of his early personal appearances, before the shoe and accessory market exploded, "Without Vivier, there would be no shoes!"

1960's Shoe Memoir .... and intro to Roger Vivier

I have been sketching a Fashion Memoir on my ipad since I have been living in France, with the wonderful program Paper 53.  So when I went to Paris recently and saw the stupendous show of Roger Vivier's shoes at the Palais de Tokyo "Virgule, etc: In the Footsteps of Roger Vivier" a few other memories cropped up.  Here they are, with a few illustrations, as a kind of elaborate introduction to my next blog about Roger Vivier The Master.  

I grew up in the suburbs of Manhattan so I was exposed to truly amazing clothes in the 60's and 70's, which were extraordinarily formative for me as a (future) designer. Not only did I see fantastic things in Vogue, but I got to experience them in real life, not often on people but in stores like Bergdorf's and Bendel's .... and St Marks for vintage.

My neighbor Kathy's parents must have gone to a lot of parties. Her Mom's closet, where we often goofed around, had groovy sheath dresses (it was around 1970) her jewelry box was filled with long dangley sequined earrings, and she had hairpieces to stack up on her dark shiny short haircut with bangs. But it was the shoes that really got me ..... I was transfixed by the square toed spring green and white patent leather ones with square pilgrim buckles and chunky heels .... why??? Probably because they seemed to step right off the pages of Vogue .... I saw all their pictures of people at parties and didn't really understand that they were real people, I think I imagined that they must be like players in a film. But these shoes were the real thing, worn by someone I knew, and they had a great sense of humour too, just like what I was seeing in Vogue!

Shoes always held a special place in my heart and mind, and I often dreamt about them. I was lucky enough to be able to buy special and usually very expensive things at radical sale prices so I was our small town's fashion plate. I ran into my 5th grade teacher not so long ago and he said that he still remembered when I came to class with flowers painted on my knees (like Twiggy in Vogue).

Fast forward to when I was an art student in NY in the early 80's, still roving the city looking at amazing clothes and accessories I could no longer buy at those fantastic sale prices, when Roger Vivier opened a shop on Madison Avenue. I didn't know about him, and I was gobsmacked by the shoes I saw there. For a long time I regretted not buying these on sale there for a still-astronomical price, though they were the simplest things there, I recognized them as iconic and would have worn them plenty through the 80's I guess, but I don't miss them now.   Especially since there is plenty of documentation everywhere about everything from the 50's on, and the stupendous Vivier show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which I saw this week ..... I still wonder if Kathy's Mom had the the famous Vivier Pilgrim shoes, but it doesn't really matter, their effect on me was the same .... a formative experience for a future shoe designer.  

A Conversation with Mandy Aftel: Essential Perfume Ideas & Ideals

As promised, here is the transcript of my (long) conversation with Mandy Aftel ... there are lots of gems in here, grab a cup of tea and get comfortable for a good read, a sip, a sniff, and a think!

THE THIRD THING

Water is H₂O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
but there is also a third thing, that makes it water
and nobody knows what it is.  - DH Lawrence

I wonder what your perfume interests were before you got involved with perfume through research?

Well, I wasn't specifically perfume oriented, I would say that I was more sensually oriented. I like food, aromas, I like to touch things, I used to weave, I like ethnic things from foreign countries. I had an interest in the sensuality of material culture ever since I can remember. The experience of beauty that comes in through the senses was, and is, absolutely fascinating to me, and by extension perfume was one of them. What do you really think about when you are approching making a perfume? Do you think in perfume, do you translate your ideas and feelings into perfume? Yes I do think in materials. My materials are very important to me. There are two things that need to connect simultaneously whcih motivates me to want to create a perfume for me; materials and feelings. I very intentionally keep my line of fragrances small; for me, they are like chapters in a book. 

So each perfume is actually in relationship to the other perfumes?

In its class, yes. Within the liquids and solids and body oils, I try to have a kind of offering that covers a lot of different experiences. I love that you call them "experiences" instead of just the material sense of Perfume. Are the "chapters" about your relationship to your client? Well, it is also about my relationship to myself. It's very complex, I don't like to repeat myself. A perfume will start from the relationship between two essences I am interested in and want to work with. So it's not like your approach is just that I am interested in this material and I know that this other one will play well with it, rather you are interested in creating or discovering the relationship between two materials that you are drawn to. All of my perfumes can be traced back to two ingredients. But primarily I am interested in a feeling. I am interested in what is ineffable in human life, and what you can't really do with words, because if you can do it with words, I don't really need to make a perfume about it. So I'm looking to create an experience, first for myself, and secondly to put it in that bottle and give it to somebody else. It's a kind of an experience of and a relationship between between two materials, which is how everything starts in my mind, and then I go on and create from there. There's a feeling and imaginative component about human life and there's a kind of friendship between two materials, and that friendship, in my mind, dictates absolutely everything else that will go into the perfume.

Can you talk about Cepes and Tuberose? There are the two ingredients right there in the name and it is endlessly fascinating ... It is such a strange and magical and perfect combination .... so you had the idea of those two materials and you were going to see what happened when you worked with them?

Cepes and Tuberose is a perfect example. I spend a lot of time smelling essences and thinking about their aesthetics without any goal of creating a perfume in mind. I just smell this with this and this with that. I see the oils as having very distinct personalities that are embodied in their smells. So I like to see what they do with one another on many different levels, and one day I must have put the Cepes with the Tuberose, I must have had the caps in my hands, I smell things in the caps a lot. I like to smell things in their undiluted state, which is what I love to do. Things can smell so weird in their undiluted state .... Yes, I think that most people work with things diluted, but I never do.   

Me: Well I think you like weird smells .... Mandy: I more than like weird smells, I LOVE weird smells!

And you have an excellent imagination so you know what it will smell like diluted .....

Perfume IS always a dilution of the material. In a perfume the essence is diluted and modified, and I love the full bodied intensity of the material, that is a real turn-on to me as an artist, I love that they are so intense and have so much going on in them, and I will walk around with them on a scent strip for a long time. So with Cepes and Tuberose, I don't remember why I was smelling them together, but I was, and I noticed the Tuberose had this very earthy component that I had never picked up on before, but when they were together I noticed that they kind of locked down at the base, there was an overlap there, which was very un-Tuberosey and kind of interesting. (Me: Which is why I love it so much, because it IS so un-Tuberosey...) Then I thought I would like to see what happens with them.

So that particular Cepes -- and everything for me is really related to the particular material I have, I am really attached the exact ones I have chosen (which is also a source of terrible anxiety because I never know if I will ever be able to get it again, but that's all part of it) -- has a very high odor intensity and it can make a perfume incredibly muddy. And I wanted to still have it be beautiful but with a different kind of beauty. I made that perfume a very long time ago, and it really is, in a way, a simple perfume. Everything else in it is what I call fillers, everything is in service to those two materials, there is not another strong personality in there. When you said that the essences have personalities, do they have personifications? Do you think of them as actual humans who you might have known, or is it the idea of a certain personality type? They are definitely not people, and they have several identities to me but first they have their utilitarian identities, where I know what they are going to do, which is probably the most important thing in working with natural materials. I know the blending capacaties of each essence, what they do, how they function, which is knowable only to a point, which makes it both worthy of study, and completely unknowable, which I really like, because I love the mystery.   

Because it's so volatile, does it unfold right in front of you as you do it?

When you put two personalities, two essences, together and you add a third, you're off. Every time you add something else into it, on your way to ultimately getting something you call a perfume, you are changing the way those other materials interact and they way they relate to one another which I find quite interesting. The specificity of working with these materials dictates how specific it is in my head, like "use bitter orange, don't use blood orange, don't use wild sweet orange, maybe yellow mandarin, no none of that, those are all sort of similar smells". I find the nuances of differences between odors that are similar absolutely thrilling.

Me again: Do you ignore the the map of a perfume you have in your head sometimes and go off in another direction? Mandy: I am always going off in another direction!

So your intent starts with those two essences but what happens after that is the trip?

The two essences are connected to a feeling that I want to capture, often from my own life. It comes out of things I have experienced when listening to music, or looking at art, or a certain emotion or just being alive. Something that I can't put into words but it is deeply felt experience that I have no interest in putting into words (even though I am a writer:), I want to put it into the bottle. It's always something very deep for me, it could be sad or beautiful or anything deeply felt.

So it's not always about beauty or the sublime, rather it can go off into other directions? I mean can you translate any feeling into scent, like anger or love?

I think I feel a wave of inspiration and a wave of a feeling when I first read Virginia Woolf and she would write about the consciousness of the day and the things that went through your mind and how you felt about it. I feel like we are doing that all the time, and perfume gets interlaced with those experiences and I love the idea that I make things that they go into the living of someone else's life. I just love the way my perfume can be a part of someone's life. It doesn't feel like a good or a commodity, it feels like an intimacy with my customer.

So as a perfumer you are giving someone else an actual experience of a feeling, a totally nonverbal communication, which is really the only way to describe what your perfume is doing, isn't it?

What I love is that the perfume goes along with my customer and becomes a part of the experience they are having in their life. It is the biggest turn-on for me as a perfumer that this could be happening, which I would really miss if I weren't a small perfumer, making everything myself. Making perfume isn't the only thing you do with your materials, you really seem to make the most out of your beloved essences on many levels. I do a lot of different things with essences. I am working on several custom perfumes, and I have lots of involvement with food and flavors, there are many things I am interested in doing with the materials, and I have to say that the materials are the center of everything for me. And this is why I work with naturals, because I absolutely love them. The beauty that is right there ready to be smelled is so incredible for me, working with such astoundingly beautiful materials. 

One of our connections is that we both love the material world, you just love "stuff", right?

I love stuff that has a history, when I can feel the depth and the backstory of it, that is the thrill for me, the fact that I can use what I consider to be the absolute finest materials that have been around throughout history. I feel like they carry that inside them, I don't always need to get into all of it, but it's always there.

Remind me of when the perfume moment hit you, was it through old books or through essences?

I used to be a psychotherapist for creative people, which I did for 30 years, and I wrote a book, which I am still very proud of, called The Story of Your Life. It was on plot and narrative, in life, not in books. I realized that everything was about a story, people had to tell me a story and I had to enter into that story to understand their lives. So I got very interested in how stories were created, either verbally or on the page. When I wrote that book I read hundreds of books on plot and narrative, and I decided I knew so much about it that I was going to write a novel. For some reason, I have no idea why I decided that my main character would be a perfumer .... so since I like research so much, I went out and started to collect (this is way before the internet) old books on perfume, because I knew, and I have no idea how I knew this, that most perfumes were synthetic, and that was not at all interesting to me, intellectually or aesthetically. 

So I began to collect turn-of-the-century perfume books and when I started to read them I fell completely in love with them. They were so charming, to me they seemed to be Medieval Manuals with recipes for so many strange things that I just loved. So my editor friend who I had written The Story of Your Life for said "why don't you write a book on perfume?" So I started to write Essence and Alchemy, and at the same time I realized that I was bad at business and that I would only do custom perfumes. This way I wouldn't have to have a business or a line, or make things over and over again, and lo and behold people started to come to me! So I very slowly grew organically into what I do now. When I went on my book tour, I realized that people didn't know a lot about materials, people thought that a lot of things that are synthetic were natural! 

Because of where I live, I knew a lot of people in the food world too, so I ended up writing Aroma with Daniel Patterson. At first I just had one perfume that people really liked, which I made over and over again, my Jasmine solid perfume, which I still make. I also made Alchemy perfume for the book and people kept asking about it so I decided I would have those two solid perfumes, period. Then the Internet happened, which is perfect for someone like me! I had this incredible opportunity through the internet to deal directly with people who like my things, so I didn't have to be in any stores. 

Do you have a thing in your head that is a combination or a feeling or a perfume that you keep trying to get to but can't really figure out?

Oh yes, I have a lot of oils that I cannot get to the bottom of. I feel like I try to get them to unlock their secret to me when I am working with them and it is entirely dependent on who they are with. It is so much like life, it's totally fascinating. Like the essence Fire Tree, I have never gotten to the bottom of it, ever. And I have worked and tried and put it into a lot of stuff, and I am sure that someday I will figure it out .. .There are other materials that I have here, right now I have this incredible Gardenia called Tiare that I got from the grower in Tahiti, and I can't wait to work with ...

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you really aren't trying to come up with Strange things, but a lot of what you love is Strange, and it comes out in different ways, some Strange and some Not So Strange.

No I am not trying to do Strange at all. I am expressing something very deep inside of me through this medium, and I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to do this every day, which is such a joy for me. But I do find that there is something about how the strange smells, along with the beautiful smells kind of wake you up to life.     

I think it is an opportunity that you have created, by being so completely true to yourself in everything you have done.

Well, working with an essence is like this, I have this precious thing to work with, and I want to highlight its incredible beauty. Sometimes I think am I crazy to tamper with it. It has been around so long, carrying so much mystery, and here it is in my hands. This Transcendent grace and beauty is in objects, it's in people, and it's in life. There is something so extraordinary about that aliveness and that beauty, the fecal in the floral, the good and the bad, the intensity in the materials is symbolic of what life is like. It is all inside these aromatics, that stretch so far back into human history, all around the world, and through every species, and it feels like a very rich medium to be able to work in.

THE END ;-)

The Natural State of Perfume (According to Me)

I moved to the French Province of Brittany over a year ago and it which had a profound effect on my sense of smell, and I started to crave natural scents or natural smelling scents more than ever before.  Perhaps it is due to my new environment, or the changes in my life, or that my system has cleared the morass of the profoundly UNnatural environment of Los Angeles, or all three.  In fact on my Spring trip back to LA I felt my senses somehow clogged up again, taking a few weeks to clear upon my return.

Back in the 70's when I was a teenager I remember trying Calandre when it came out (a perfume that got a lot of attention in a world of only a few notable perfume releases a year instead of more than 1000 these days!)  and I could barely smell the darned thing.  And what little I COULD smell seemed wrong somehow, yucky and sour. I realized immediately that there were "new" perfume ingredients that I couldn't experience the way other people did which I interpreted as new synthetics, and I was right.  I have never had a problem smelling Vintage synthetics properly, so I figured I wasn't missing much if newfangled ingredients eluded me.  Fast forward to 2013 with everyone seeming to use the same aroma chemicals and it holds truer than ever!  

It seems undeniable that natural essences have more resonance than synthetics, being olafactorily much more complex  (the scent components of Jasmine are said to number over 400!) and in a way it is the job of synthetics to reduce each instrument in the symphony to its individual "notes".  I suppose this serves a number of purposes, of course they are cheaper, perhaps narrower compositions are more easily perceived by the buying public, and if even 100 components of a natural scent can be isolated and synthesized then chemical companies can sell perfumers many more pieces for their puzzles. 

It is clear to me that composing perfumes with natural essences is especially demanding if you want to make something that smells like more than the sum of its parts.....so often natural perfume smells like its literal components, which can be nice, but it is not at all what I am looking for in a perfume, which is what I am looking for in 'most everything else: transcendence.

Enter Mandy Aftel.  Having been a fan of her perfumes for years, at first conceptually, when I read Essence and Alchemy; then concretely, when I got to enter her world on a deeper level attending her workshop at Esalen a couple of years ago.  I was completely captivated by her and her work, and we began our friendship there. We have very similar approaches to our different creative disciplines, and our attitudes, values and personal histories connect over and over, stimulating and motivating me in countless ways. 

To me, her work as a artisinal perfumer stands out in the world of natural perfume, her compositions always seem to be about more than nature.  She is in love with her materiels as a natural perfumer must be, but when you smell one of her creations it is clear that a rose is NOT a rose as it seems to be to other people.  I have always sensed that she is somehow working from a different place, which seems that it must be conceptual as well as structural.  Like someone once said about the tennis player Andre Agassi "Everyone else is playing Tennis, but he is doing something else."

This weekend I will post the stimulating conversation I had with Mandy about how she works and what we are really smelling when we experience her perfume ..... until then ......

HCG Diet Tips for Food Lovers

I detest food limitations, so you can imagine how I fare on the HCG Diet, but I felt it necessary and it works* so here we are.  Luckily I live in France so the little food I DO eat tastes great, but it is still necessary to tweak it as much as possibe so I am not miserable!  I have made some great discoveries that I thought I should share to help people like me to make this great but narrowed down diet more palatable, here you go.
1) Using the classic food technique of deglazing to make a sauce.
    Of course you have to have a non stick pan with a very strong (non teflon) coating.........then you can deglaze it with a bit of stock or Jerez sherry vinegar (I have a vinegar collection which includes Balsamic of course, red wine, raspberry, apple cider etc) or even a teeny bit of Organic pure Apple Juice and add herbs to make sauces which are totally necessary when you are serving very lean meat!


2) Flavor sprays and flavored salt add much needed oomph.
    As a Perfumista I have been acquainted with Mandy Aftel's wonderful natural perfumes for a long time, and this year she added flavor sprays to her offerings, which are indispensable on this diet.  
    Just a spritz or two of Black Pepper or Blood Orange spray -elevates the boring plain chicken or roasted fennel to another level.  I make myself Mocktails using Mineral Water and a spritz of Yuzu and Orange.  I wish I had more, but I will next time!  
	I also have an arsenal of flavored salts from The Spice Sage that I use on everything I cook on this diet: Vanilla, Merlot, Jalepeno, Curry, Smoked salts make a huge difference.
3) Don't forget to use contemporary cooking trends and techniques.
	If you are an Ottolenghi fan like me, his recipes can be very instructive.  I use his recipe for roast turkey breast (not the industrially produced stuff) which utilizes a wonderful marinade of vinegar, white wine (omit if it seems like a bad idea on the diet, I just use a soupcon if I have it), lemon, tons of cilantro, mint, parsley and cumin, which your poultry (use chicken if turkey seems wrong for your version of the diet) rests in overnight for a flavor packed roast.  It is the acid which really brings out the flavor (see below).  Then I throw in my vegetable choice of the evening with the roast, and reduce the marinade for my sauce.  Almost like not dieting!


4) Cooking with citrus juices.
	My hands down favorite recipe for fish is in aGarlic and Orange sauce from the fantastic Persian cookbook A Taste of Persia by Najmieh Batmanglij.  Just sauté garlic in your pan then add a cup of fresh orange and lemon juice into which you have dissolved saffron (ground with a mortar and pestle is best), with a bit of turmeric and cook the fish in this sauce.  



    I add the teeniest bit of Arrowroot to thicken it which yields a velvety sauce.  I mean teeny, like 1/8 tsp!
	Preserved lemons are great to have on hand, if you don't have them handy, just chop up a nice organic lemon (including the skin) and simmer in some water with some salt until it turns into the consistency of jam and use it as a flavoring or condiment.
       I just remembered a Duck with Orange Sauce a French friend made for me, cooking down an orange the same way (I will finish it with a bit of vinegar) which I will try this week.  Any poultry will do.
5) Don't skimp on salt and pepper, salting food while it is cooking brings out the flavor, don't just sprinkle it on afterwards!   



I am two weeks into the diet (10 lbs down) with about ten days to go (then the dreaded maintence for three weeks) wish me luck!
*the controversy about this diet is silly, the (homeopathic drops in my case) HCG instructs your body to burn its own fat and you supply the protein and vegetables.  Check Sherill Sellman's site for more useful info. 

 

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Pierre was painting this while I was making my last blog entry........

.........maybe we are feeling the same things at the same time, which only happens about 50% of the time here! In direct relation to daily life we have very similar reactions and takes on what is going on and how we feel about it, but about our lives here and there, the vagaries of our feelings are not as attuned to eachother's.

via qwendy.typepad.com

Check out Pierre's wonderful painting!

Perfume Bites the Dust (Part 2)

I went through a period a number of years ago when I was so put off by new scents that only vintage perfumes smelled good to me!  I am not exactly anti-synthetic, but the contemporary crop of perfume chemicals (in contrast with what I call Original Synth from the first half of the 20th Century) is so omni-present I am just sick of all of it! 

I recently had the chance to smell a 8 or 9 Gardenia scents on a whim, to compare and contrast them and choose one, when I had a sudden craving for big white florals. This happens to Perfumistas.  It was painfully obvious that they were all working around the same one or two "gardenia" molecules, some formulations were better for me than others, but the blatant similarity diminished the whole group!  Yes I was able to choose my favorite, but that's really not enough for me, as a lover of original perfumes.  

On my recent trip to NY I was drawn to a new Oud Rose perfume, but I swear that everyone even seems to be using the same couple of Oud molecules, what a bore!  One would think that they would make 10 or 20 different Ouds to exploit all the different facets of this amazing material, but no!  Regardless, Rosam is half the price of Kilian's Rose Oud and might be a bit of a smell alike (although it has been ages since I tried the Kilian). 

It's hard to understand what perfumers are doing when you smell what is around and then see a fab photo like this of perfumer Isobel Doyen working at her perfume organ, WTF???  Yes she has composed a number of "uber niche" scents like Elena at Perfume Shrine mentions in her nice interview, but I wonder what she is doing now?  Do the companies demand something that smells just like something else that sold well by another perfume line -- which is why I didn't become a commercial shoe designer -- and isn't she totally frustrated?  It just seems like they are using the same bases and ingredients over and over again in about 10 different genres and achieving slightly different but all too recognizable tonal qualities! 

Luckily lots of people aren't looking for the most unusual, original, oddball perfumes, and more than ever before, even I often just want to "smell good," but there are lots of us Perfumistas disillusioned with the perfume world, so we will have to share resources.  Not everyone is looking for ultra personal and iconoclastic scents, and it is a noble pursuit just to smell great in our world overrun with the same scent chemicals everywhere.

Of course as a reaction to the 100's of toxic waste-like commercial perfume and now all of the fraternal twin niche scents unleashed on us every moment, there is a big Natural Perfume movement.

It was first beautifully elucidated by the wonderful Mandy Aftel in Essence and Alchemy, who I call the Godmother of the movement (more about her in the next blog), the only natural perfumer making things that I actually crave, although there many others to explore, from the ridiculous to the sublime.   

To be fair, there are several perfume houses who still speak with an original voice, Frederic Malle, Serge Lutens, Patricia de Nicolai, Andy Tauer, Les Histoires de Parfums, and Miller Harris, to name a few, maybe we can make a list!    

 

Perfume Bites the Dust (Part 1)

Having been a perfume lover for most of my life and more recently a Grand Amateur (in the French sense of being a huge fan and/or student or fancier) of perfume in the past ten years, I find myself depressed by and disconsolate about what is happening to perfume in the 21st Century.    

The situation is similar, I suppose, to what happened in the film business 20 years ago, when Independents started flourishing as a reaction to the crowd pleasing drivel of the entrenched mainstream film business, but eventually became became sort of a second tier of the fat cat industry, supported and sometimes cannibalized by them.  So now there is Mainstream film , Mainstream Independent film, Independent film, and a kind of Guerilla film. 

In the perfume world, so called Niche brands seemed to appear suddenly in the 80's, typified in by Annick Goutal and Jean Laporte,  who represented a kind of break with the tradition of classic french perfume, using ingredients that seemed more clearly defined and directly apprehended by the contemporary consumer blossoming in those prosperous times. 

As a young woman who grew up with snootfuls of Diorissimo, Yardley, Love, Rain, and the iconic American Estée Lauder in-your-face scents like Azuree and Private Collection, these brave new scents were a natural extension of what I loved from my adolescence in the 70's.  ( I wrote about these influences on my young self when I first started this blog) Luckily Barneys had appeared in Southern California sometime during this period, offering the Les Jardins Retrouve scents among others, which were refreshingly direct and uplifting, and I went through bottles of the stuff.      

In the 90's I experienced a kind of Perfume Fatigue, there just weren't enough perfumes in the new niche world for me to use to express myself properly and keep me happy and stimulated.  I had been through all of the single note natural offerings I could gobble up from Spain or France,  (everything available in LA that is), whatever I found at Barney's 50 miles away, every Annick Goutal and Laporte I liked, and what remained was already a sea of Department Store choices, which, as an iconoclast, I could never consider.    

I limped along for several years with the dregs of my past forays into perfume, until my first trip to France with Pierre, where he introduced me to Serge Lutens' perfumes at the Palais Royal, happily opened in 1992, and they were a revelation, but only available on our trips to Paris and at 100 Euros a pop (in 1997!) a bottle at a time was all I could do.  The following year I discovered Santa Maria Novella in Florence and bought 4 or 5, two bottles of Zagara, which I truly loved. A year or two I tried to get more Zagara but it had changed completely (I naively thought that maybe the crop of flowers had changed a lot, but I now think that they had started to augment their formulas with perfume chemicals to meet their rising demand and make better profit margins too).  Luckily by chance I tripped over Parfums de Nicolai on my last day in Paris and bought 4 perfumes between 10:30 and 11 in the morning, before catching the shuttle to the airport, phew!  

Unbeknownst to me, there was a burgeoning world of perfume lovers glomming onto perfumes, both new and vintage, whom I happily discovered upon my arrival home, when I researched my new perfumes on the Internet, a fairly new type of pursuit, and found the original group of Perfumistas on Makeupalley.    There were amazing women like Victoria Frolova now of Bois de Jasmin, and Denyse Beaulieu now of Grains de Musc, and other afficionados talking about and swapping perfumes, all of whom were extremely forthcoming and generous to me as a novice, and I discovered new Niche scents, beautiful old Classics, and books like The Emperor of Scent which had just come out at that moment in 2003, and Essence and Alchemy, released in 2001.  

Having pursued beauty and originality in all of my accoutrements for my whole life (and trying to add my own to the world by this time as a shoe designer) I was always hunting for new stimulation for all of my senses (as well as my designs of course) and my perfume world discoveries completed a big part of the puzzle for me.  

Here we are, fast forwarding to 2013, and the explosion of "Niche Perfume" in the last 10 years that looked like it was going to give us all kinds of wonderful new scent ideas to explore seems to have become a kind of extension of perfume chemical companies, compounded by the bevy of new regulations due to so called allergens in perfumes, the field of materials has somehow narrowed and everyone seems to be working with the same darned stuff with similar results.  

 

I am trusting my own nose on this, but there are people with better noses than mine who concur that there are a few dominant types of scent or themes that all smell very similar, so at least I don't feel like I am alone in this, nor am I going crazy.  But I am very sad about the turn perfume has taken and very disappointed in the whole perfume world, large and small, shame on you all, or most of you!