2017-05-07 The Dry Down #10: The Sunday Six / Leather
Hello again Drydowners, and welcome to The Sunday Six. To recap for new subscribers (hello all and welcome to our crazy perfume play zone!), The Sunday Six is our joint version of The Dry Down, where we each give you three quick perfume recommendations around a theme. These are improvisational selections: they are meant as starting points for experimentation, rather than unyielding Best-Of lists. Perfume is always yielding. Go play. And let us know where your noses take you.
Today's theme: LEATHER. The smell of a riding crop and a motorcycle jacket, of the inside of a new car and an old library. Leather is one of the oldest notes in professional perfumery: the Gauntier Perfumeurs (aka the glovemakers/perfumers/model/DJs) of 16th c. France learned how to scent their gloves with rich floral oils to cover up the death-scent of the tannery (god forbid the aristocracy sense that something had to die so that they may cloak their hands in buttery material). What we think leather smells like now grew out of these experiments -- where hide meets roses, where skin meets the denial of skin. There were two major schools of leather-scenting in olde perfumery: Russian leather (sharp, tarred, citrusy, like a squeaky boot), and Spanish leather (animalic, musky, with notes of cream and fruit, the scent of a fresh wallet), but now those are mostly terms of the past. Many modern leather perfumes are vegan -- completely synthetic -- and the category tends to be all over the place now. Here, we have picked six of our favorite leathers, which smell like everything from vintage books to the problematic fantasy of armchair tourism. Strap on your chaps and go experimenting. 
Metal Hurlant, Pierre Guillame - HF
The guy I dated when I was eighteen and he was twenty-seven, just before I left for college, didn’t actually have a motorcycle or a leather jacket. He wasn’t actually all that bad or rebellious - he was a prematurely balding stoner who didn’t have a driveable car because he’d refused to pay a bunch of tickets and whom I therefore had to drive to and from all our dates, and he was a person with exactly all the insidious emotional inabilities one would expect from an adult in his late twenties who chooses to date a teenager. But nevertheless, saying that something smells like a motorcycle or a leather jacket is an accurate way of explaining what happens when I remember those couple months and my longing toward that extremely innocent form of self-sabotage, when I took people utterly at their exterior, that small and fragile idea of movie masculinity when I could still believe in it, when I could still get some flavor out of a shallow glass with a short straw. It was the idea of motorcycles and leather jackets and the idea was all I needed and mattered more than the thing itself – I got to what I would have wanted from the thing, what the thing stood for, without having to proceed through the thing itself to get there.
Often, I think, this is what we want from perfume, what perfume offers, is how to get at not the memory of the thing itself, at experiences that are hard to reach because they weren’t actually a thing but they were, experiences borrowed from others or predicated on imagining – the longing for a house we never lived in, for a life we plotted and then never actualized, for plans we made but never followed through on, for someone we loved but never got close to, for a place we only visited once but inexplicably longed for for years after. It’s the way you can miss things you didn't have, and explain memories through what they weren’t, through the absent objects with which you surround them in order to make them legible. Perfume carries this unspeakability, this language of absence and almost, giving it presence without shape, wafting its ghost into rooms, matching the things that fall between where they can be explained and where they can be dismissed.
Sometimes we like people just because they myth we want them to inhabit is the same myth they hope to project, because our lies about them match their lies about themselves. This is a good way to know someone briefly, wading only up to the level where someone is still an experience rather than a person. Anyway, Metal Hurlant is another Pierre Guillame (swoon) creation, from his Collection Croisiere, and it smells like my bad news boyfriend from the summer when I was eighteen. Or rather, it doesn't smell like him at all, but it smells like the idea of a boy who’s a rebel, the outdated and clichéd image of a guy in a leather jacket on a motorcycle riding in to sweep you away into bad choices. It’s big and loud and has nothing soft or surprising in it, all metal and gasoline and leather.
But Metal Hurlant is at once more obviously dirty and more innocent. One of the most sweetly naïve ways one can think about sex is to think that it’s exactly as dirty, as naughty, as bad as advertisements for perfume and movies and cars make it out to be, that it’s as pure and simple as getting away with something, as doing something bad that feels good. Of course this isn’t really true. Plenty of sex is banal and middle-class, absolutely permitted and entirely uninteresting. Plenty of sex isn’t particularly bad – in the way people use that word to talk about glamorous movie crimes – and doesn’t feel particularly good. But the teenage idea that all sex is like that, the memory of being young enough that any mention of doing it sent a hopeful, nervous, shiver up your spine, remains its own discrete emotion, its own particular longing, one that strengthens as lived experienced makes clear the gap between this and the actuality of what happens between people’s bodies, of how much of it is fraught and unadventurous.
I can tell you what this perfume smells like without talking about my own stupid heart at all, though: It smells like the Fast and the Furious movies. If it smells bad, it is bad in the same way that the characters in the Fast and the Furious are bad. Which is to say, they do big, utterly serious, grand larceny crimes that would in reality have a massive cost to city infrastructure and civilian lives, but the movies dwell only in glory, not in consequence, and so we love them for it instead of being mad that our city doesn’t have an airport anymore because some dudes had to do a bunch of car crimes. Metal Hurlant smells like a cloud of car exhaust and a heavy, slick-polished leather jacket, a man scowling enticingly from a motorcycle, the innocent belief that the worst thing anyone might ever do to you would still be something exciting, the misguided hope that there is anything complex or mysterious to the angry secrets of men.
Mona Di Orio Cuir - RS
When I was 25 years old, someone stole my leather jacket from a bar. Wait, let me amend that sentence. When I was 25 years old, some bitch stole my leather jacket from a bar. It could very well have been a man, or a confused older woman, or a person on the verge of a nervous breakdown who was one serendipitous leather jacket away from self-destruction, but whoever it was remains the one and only mortal enemy I have ever made in New York. I'm sure that this person is, likely, ambling around out there somewhere trying their best, that they are a person who has loved ones counting on them, who takes tedious burdens off of beleaguered co-workers and who makes goofy faces at babies on the subway, a person who likes hot baths and cold seltzer and who has experienced disappointment so great that they wondered if they would ever get off the floor. They probably don’t even remember their midnight robbery now; or maybe they realized their mix-up moments after leaving the bar and ran down the street trying to find me, and they still wonder where I am every time they see the coat swinging in the closet. I'm sure of all that, and yet, they will always, always be some bitch to me; because in the moment when they took my jacket, either out of malice or confusion or the kind of drunk that makes a person feel like an invincible maw of need, they stole something from me that I can never get back. I mean, look, I generally subscribe to the It’s Just Stuff school of property ownership; you can't take anything with you to give the worms, and you should allow for most tangible things to slip easily and and out of your life; the harder you grip onto anything the faster you wear yourself out. It's just stuff. I ingested that philosophy from my mother, who learned early on that I was a forgetful, distracted child who lost every valuable item ever put in my hands; lockets, geodes, the TI calculator that cost $250 that school required us to buy and I misplaced less than a month into the semester. I leave Kindles on planes and earrings in cushions; I have had my wallet returned to me by not one but two good New York samaritans. I know exactly where the taxi parking lots are in Queens because I have visited them more than once to recover my phone. I’ll think I'm getting better, and then my journal disappears. But, you know, it's just stuff.
My leather jacket, though, that wasn't just anything. It was a whole identity spread out on my back, a map of my first years in the city when I grafted my ambitions onto my clothes. I bought the jacket (vintage Schott, jet black) when I was 22, at Beacon’s Closet, but even pre-owned it had cost me two months of discretionary funds on an assistant’s salary. It was black and a size too big and had spiky silver epaulets that could take an eye out, and it was beautiful. I wore it everywhere: to magazine launch parties at Gotham Hall where the underling cohort would perch by the kitchen in pursuit of the mini-grilled cheeses that doubled as dinner, to karaoke at Winnie’s in Chinatown where an old man always seemed to be warbling Cyndi Lauper at 2am, on dates to Florent tossed over a one-time-use spandex garbagedress and paired with a pair of wobbly silver Mary Janes that I wore into the ground (literally, they died as they lived, caught on a ragged cobblestone), to work wearing giant hangover sunglasses and sucking down a gelatinous egg and cheese sandwich. That jacket smelled like bacon and Parliaments and 2-for-1 PBR at Welcome to the Johnsons and mango-margarita vomit and the fancy argan hair products I took from the beauty closet at a friend’s fashion mag offices and Vanessa’s dumplings and probably no small amount of salty mascara juice shed over someone who wasn't worth it. And it smelled like perfume. It smelled like all the perfumes I wore before, the perfumes I thought a person should be wearing when they lived in New York City. That jacket smelled like Marc Jacobs Daisy, a sticky-sweet grapefruit smoothie I can't even get close to now but wore almost religiously once; and it smelled like Issey Miyake L’eau because an older editor I desperately wanted to be once told me that it was her signature scent, and I so stole it from her -- like a jacket from a bar -- though my theft was only temporary. Issey is a clean aquatic that gets its sea spray from an aromachemical called calone, which smells like honeydew melon and ground-up oyster shells, and, in its oceanic piety, tends to elicit shame in anyone who isn’t actively invested in minimalism as a defining aesthetic. I learned quickly that I wasn’t meant to smell like I had bathed in holy waters; instead I turned to sloppy masculines, boozy tuberoses, grimy scents that smelled like petrichor. I contaminated that jacket with my own mistakes; it smelled like neroli and street pollution, like gardenias and halal cart cumin, like cheap shampoo and expensive incense.
What I am trying to say is that I formed an entire world inside that leather shell. I realize there might be some poetry to having it taken from me, one night at a bar called Sweet Paradise while I was dancing to Justice and drinking one of those tiny twee cans of pink Sofia champagne. It was my youth, and it was skin I had to shed. If I still had it, I probably wouldn't be wearing it anymore. I learned at some point that boxy oversized jackets aren't my glory zone. But damn, I wish I still had it just to smell it.
The closest I have ever felt to burying my face in that jacket again is when an actress named Anna who used to work at Twisted Lily slipped me a sample vial of Mona Di Orio’s Cuir, claiming it to be the best leather she had ever known. She's not wrong. The way Mona made this perfume, I sense that she also did some heavy living inside a leather jacket. I write about Mona di Orio a lot here, but that is because I love her perfumes so much, and I will never get to tell her because she didn’t live to be 43 years old. She died in 2011 due to a surgical complication, and just like that, one of the world’s best female perfumers was gone. There are so few, even now (Arielle Weinberg gave a talk on the dearth of women in the industry at Dry Down Live, and the numbers are truly galling; we will write more about this one day), and Mona was one of the very best. She had no formal connections to the fragrance world, but she grew up in France saving every dime of her pocket money to buy a bottle of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue; she just knew, this was it, this was it. She began a teenage correspondence with the legendary nose Edmond Roudnitska, who sent her perfumery books and encouraged her to go to school and find him when she was ready to create. They worked alongside each other for 15 years -- there is a story on Basenotes that I love about how Roudnitska made her sleep next to a nocturnal tuberose plant so that its scent would wake her up like a blooming alarm clock. When she started her own house in 2004, she immediately started to push herself into new terrain. Her scents smell like reaching the known limits of each note; her scents all had pages and pages of mythological backstory. In one of her last interviews, she talked about making her infamous, smoky Vanille: “I said, ‘I have to build a story.’ So I was thinking, ‘Let’s find the link, let’s find the purpose between the ingredients.’ I began to dream and I imagined this big ship, some centuries ago. And I was thinking, ‘So it’s going to Madagascar, and it’s going to the sea and to the Comoros Islands. So it’s going to take the vanilla pods. What else you have on the boat? You have cloves. Of course you have some oranges, because if the sailors don’t want to develop scurvy, they have to eat some oranges.”
She had a elegant Roman nose, the leonine profile of a real perfumer. And she infused her scents with shipwrecks and scurvy. I am really sad that I never got to talk to her. Her leather tells me that we may have had a lot to discuss. As one scent archivist said of Mona, “When you spoke to her, as Dietrich said of Orson Welles, you felt like a plant that had been watered.”
Mona’s Cuir smells like fine leather, to be sure, but also droplets of neck-sweat, old makeup palettes, a jasmine absolute that has faded at the edges, the sizzle of fried food (that comes from the amber). It's a worn in, earned scent, the kind that takes years to acquire naturally. And then, when you least expect it, you go out dancing and some bitch steals it all from you. I hope whoever took my jacket is happy now, I really do. They have my stuff. I have my Mona, and my memories. And together, they almost conjure up the cloud of a girl who once wobbled around in Daisy.
Irish Leather, Memo - HF
My father is one generation removed from Irish immigrants; when he travels in Europe, he uses a green passport. Two generations ago, both sides of my dad’s family came over from Ireland, just in time to distinguish themselves in the Second World War, in which my paternal grandparents met in a medical unit where my grandmother was my grandfather’s commanding officer. After the war they moved back to a small town in Pennsylvania and raised a modest Irish Catholic brood of eight children. There’s a small town in county Clare where I’m related to just about anyone and most everyone in the town knows my dad by sight as “the doctor’s son.” When I have gone through customs at the Dublin airport, the officials look at the name on my passport and then at me and hold up the line to talk to me like I’m their long-lost niece. “Welcome home! What are you doing with this blue passport? Get yourself a green one,” they say and when I say that my Dad has the green passport they practically pull paperwork out from under the desk, as though I could just stand there and sign a few things and smile with my big forehead and my very red hair and my long polysyllabic full name and that would be citizenship, would be some meaningful identity. I feel specific in a way that I rarely, perhaps almost never do, as though I mean something before having done anything.
Memo’s perfumes are based on an idea of place – Clara and John Molloy, the couple who founded the brand, met on a chair lift at a ski resort, fell in love, and then decided to create a line of perfumes based on the notion of travel. They journeyed across the world, gathering up inspiration from one glamorous location after another. The line focuses on leathers and ouds, two extremely popular notes in current perfumes. Trends in niche perfume lean away from the delicate, and the beautiful, refusing the sort of smells we associate with our mothers, and toward the heavy sexual weirdness of things like leather and oud, animal smells and car smells, things that feel not quite appropriate for daytime worn in daytime, worn everyday. Perfume not as the politeness masking smell but as the smell refusing to be masked politely.
The funny thing is, leather isn’t always aggressive, actually. Lots of leathers are perfectly polite, appropriate for charming company. Leather is a part of the business meetings and cocktail parties and the hushed WASP ongoings of inoffensive living, it fits right in in the Hamptons. We associate the word leather with things like bondage and motor oil, but there are far more contexts for leather in which it belongs in polite society, in which it is part of an aspirational lifestyle. These are, across the board, the kind of leathers that Memo sells. They are the leathers of expensive cars and well-tailored jackets, the leathers of discreet interior accents, of high-end handbags, leathers that are more about money than skin. Memo’s perfumes feel like and smell like luxury, and the places portrayed in them are the version of each place as a luxury item. Memo is perfume as tourism.
Ireland is a weird place to sell as a luxury. It’s a place co-opted by the worst sort of false identity-claiming, one that hordes of white Americans claim without ever having been there, a place used again and again as a horrible straw man in arguments about racism and oppression and immigration and bootstraps. Much like France, it’s frequently cited as a gestural indicator of a certain kind of good taste, without any relationship to or engagement with the country’s own politics, its ugliness, its real difficulties. You see the descriptors both “French” and “Irish” a lot in perfume; both are also heritage identities that White Americans can claim or not claim, depending on their goal or their mood, without risking anything or tying themselves to anything permanent through that claim. I used to want very badly to claim my family’s Irish heritage in the worst and most stereotypical way - oh, my people, with their sorrow and their drinking and their poetry and their beautiful green tragic country.
But the truth is that I don’t know anything about Ireland. I have been there all of twice, and when I have been, I have been a tourist. What I wanted and got from the country was the superficial beauty of it, the poem or the painting, the thing that skims across the gorgeous surface. Home and residence, country and nationality are things that have dirt under their fingers, things that confront the everyday. Terroir, that dirt taste at the bottom of a glass of wine that translates as “a sense of place” is the idea of place as literal earth under your fingernails, in the creases of your skin, the consequences and heaviness and day to day grit and boredom that comes with settling your life into a place, all of these things we accumulate when we truly take on identity from a location. The sense of place is Memo’s perfumes isn’t any of that. Instead, it’s the surface clarity of tourism, the abstract rather than the whole, the summary and not the text, the gloss and not the sticky ideas.
Thomas has a friend who has a wife who has a family farm in Ireland; a couple weeks a year they go out there and he puts on tall rubber boats and a big car coat and gets covered in mud working on the farm and cleaning out the house. I love the idea of this because I have no association with it; to me it does not ring with the heaviness of family obligations, the difficult dance of boredom or duty, the sticky complexities of love and need and the way minutes of a day link up with each other from choice to choice. The fantasy of it is a clean canvas to me. I love the idea of coming in from a day of hard but ultimately frivolous work covered in mud, I love the idea of a long walk in worn in leather shoes by a green country along a rocky coastline, a place that looks like another distant planet, beautiful and sublimely unwelcoming, and ending the day in a small town bar at the end of nowhere, drinking a small glass of very peaty whiskey with a group of mysteriously wizened regulars, walking home to large warm farmhouse, down the dirt road past the white church. Probably none of this is anything like what Thomas’ friends’ wife’s farm in Ireland is like, but it is what Memo’s Irish Leather smells like, the longing idea of a week in a green country, of expensive scotch and heavy boots with pure, pungent mud caking them, of walking a cliff beside which a cold, briny ocean sprays and up stings your face.
Memo’s perfumes capture the false perfection of tourism, painted neatly in miniature, every vacation instagram filter turned up. There’s nothing wrong with this either, and a lot right with it. After all, the romantic idea of places is what we pay lots of money for when we purchase vacations. Sometimes it’s what we want to pay for with perfumes, too. Fantasy, not reality. Magic, not routine. Irish Leather is Ireland as a big welcoming poem, a secret green country full of longing and coastline and mud and wisdom and drinking songs, scotch and smoke and thick peaty earth and the spray of the cold ocean on islands off the coast of nowhere.
Suedois, Euphorium Brooklyn -RS
When we talk about smelling like leather, we have to talk about smelling like death. There is no way around it. You cannot have leather without the skin of another living thing that is no longer living. Of course, there are vegan leathers, simulacra that require no suffering (well, no animal suffering anyway; there is definitely human suffering involved in the mass production of the faux-leather handbags that Maxxinistas scoop up for spring), and there are vegan leather perfumes. Most leather perfumes are, at least nowadays, completely vegan, their “leather accords” entirely conjured by synthetic chemical nosemagick (as Marina Milojevic noted in an article on the history of leather parfum, “To achieve this strong animalistic note, perfumers also use notes created in the laboratory: quinolines, safraleine, aldehydes, and synthesized suede nuances”). There are natural elements added in as well: cade oil (also known as juniper tar, the astringent scent of a grandfather’s brylcreem), styrax (also known as snowbell, a resin that dates back to biblical times and has been used as an incense, a dental analgesic, and air freshener to drive away snakes), myrtle (a diminutive shrub that secretes an oil that smells somewhere between Vicks Vaporub and lemonade), and labdanum (the honeyed goo from a cistus plant that tends to get caught in sheep’s beards as they are grazing; sometimes called rock rose and believed to cure menstrual cramps and lung disease).
What we know as “leather” in scent is really an intellectual idea and not a true distillation of anything; it’s the ingenious concept of covering up the smell of dried-out skins with flowers so that these skins can be sold as luxury goods. The real story behind this idea is one of violence and hideous smells: many of the bloody, gut-strewn tanneries of 16th century France were located in close proximity to the Grasse perfume distilleries (where flowers were also sent to their deaths by hot steam or being suffocated in tallow), so close that the air in town became a heady melange of life and death, all mixed up; it must have smelled overwhelming and nauseating and murderous and terrifying (but then, that was the way most of Europe smelled before sewage systems were invented). Legend has it that this intermingling began when Catherine de Medici came over from Italy to rule France in 1547 and asked the Grasse tanners to start scenting their gloves with jasmine to rid them of the putrid scent of the kill; oiled gant then became de rigeur among aristocratic French try-hards (if you want to get a glimpse of what a perfumed glove smells like, try to get your hands on a limited edition new Byredo scent called Le Gant; it’s bizarre and wonderful and costs a hilarious $550 so, you know, maybe go into a store to smell it?). It was all the rage to pretend that the dead thing you were wearing on your hands arrived to your palace smelling like a rose; and that’s still pretty much where we are with leather. When you close your eyes and think of what a pure leather smells like to you (a S&M dungeon? Frye boots crunching over autumn leaves? A tawny satchel worn down by years of use?), what you must know is that whatever you are imagining is an artificial smell, a clever creation passed down from some genius in post-classical Provence who conjured up a way to give a pushy queen exactly what she desired. That smell of suede, of the inside of a new handbag, that’s always a damn lie. Actual leather smells like rotting, like wretching, like rigor mortis. It’s not pleasant, but then, luxury is about high-stakes deceit, about playing hide-the-damage inside buttery language and astronomical price tags.
The first perfumer I ever sat down with and really talked to about the craft was Stephen Dirkes, who runs a line called Euphorium Brooklyn and who I still consider to be some kind of mad fragrance hatter who takes risks that others won’t in his work. A lot of niche perfumery is purely about commerce; creativity seeps into the marketing copy and nowhere else. But Stephen is really an artist, if I can use that world without irony -- his entire perfume world grew out of a tiny world of imaginary tinkerers that appeared in stop-motion short films he made inside his Greenpoint loft. These characters have deep stories, and those stories involve smells, and so Stephen decided to try to make those smells a reality. He is a fragrance autodidact of sorts, and so doesn’t see the limitations that others learn in school -- his accords are loopy and thick and wild and weird and don’t make logical sense, which is why I am so devoted to them. He is the only person I have ever commissioned to make a private scent (he made my boyfriend a glorious vegetal vetiver that will always be called Erik #1, and will be the only bottle of it in existence), because I trust his judgment implicitly when it comes to forcing the shock of the new. When we first met, Dirkes brought me real ambergris to smell, waving an antique tin of pungent whale belly under my nose; I will never forget it. He also brought civet and castoreum, true animal secretions, to show me how very close to death we are at all times when we love perfume. These materials don’t smell fresh or vibrant, they smell like the other side of the bell curve, the decline, the decay. Stephen was the first person to tell me about the Grasse tanneries, and I remember he said something like “There is a death drive in these smells,” and that perfume is often an expression of self-loathing as much as it is of self-love. And that’s what leather is to me. You can’t wear it unless deep down, you loathe humanity as much as you love it, unless you acknowledge the gory hidden history of our hedonism, unless you know, in your heart, that opulence is a cover-up job.
Stephen makes a leather scent called Suedois, and it is nearly perfect. The perfume has a kooky and intricate backstory, which you can read here, but it mainly states that this scent was created in honor of the glove-scenters of olden times, the pioneering inventors of modern perfumery who learned their trade out of pure necessity because so many royals wanted to obscure their mortality with cassis and cream. It smells like raspberries and raisins and sandalwood and birch tar and a willful forgetting, a group delusion. But oh, how lovely to pretend.
New Sibet, Slumberhouse - HF
When you ask people what they want to smell like, or you bring up the topic of perfume, a whole lot of people will tell you that they want to smell like old books. In the somewhat pointless and performative wars between Kindle and paper books, “old book smell” frequently gets flogged as a reason paper books are sacred and inviolate and must never be replaced with these soulless, smell-less glowing devices. I get it, but Kindles are extremely convenient, and far more likely to engender actual reading at any significant volume, rather than the pose of it. This isn’t to say, though, that I have never put my face into an old book and inhaled deeply - the smell is something tweedy and resinous, halfway between a deconstructed house and a British professor who got caught in the rain on a bike ride through Cambridge. Old books smell wonderful for a sharp brief moment of cracking open yellowed pages and then closing them again, but it isn’t actually a way I’d wanted to smell. Old book smell doesn’t have anything to do with skin, with lived human experience - nothing can happen to you that causes you to smell like that. It runs parallel to how a human being smells, rather than colliding with it.
New Sibet doesn’t smell like old books, or at least it doesn’t smell like paper. What New Sibet actually smells like is a library or, even more accurately, the idea of a library, a grand old library in a university with a healthy endowment and problematic colonial history, full of dusty carpets and thick, worn-in armchairs. It smells like the kind of place where all the books on display are bound beautifully in gilt-illuminated leather, and absolutely useless to any kind of serious research. What makes old book smell work as a scent that can be worn on the skin is a leather note, and the other smells that mingle in a university library, the kind of place where more hidden corners, more secret hide-outs, reveal themselves the longer you stay - the undercurrent of cooped-up people’s sweat, a hum of anxiety and ambition and want, the waft of the snacks that somebody snuck in, the sudden out-of-place hope when someone cracks a window, the residue of cigarettes clinging to people’s hair and clothes when they come back in from one more smoke break during a marathon study session. It smells like the gummy, self-satisfied leather of old book bindings and the grateful sinking feeling when you flop onto a broken-down Chesterfield sofa. Leather dominates New Sibet, but it is rounded out by notes of ash and carnation, iris and fur and moss, and it comes together to smell like a library not in the romantic Beauty and the Beast sense of a library, but the lived-in, slightly gross, sleep-deprived, buzzing all-too-human and really pretty rank smell of a college library. Old book smell made human is admittedly a little bit gross, in the way that even the fanciest college with the most prestigious pedigree, the most beautiful wrought iron gates and most gracious green quadrangles is still full of college students, and college students are inevitably kind of disgusting. But that human grossness is what’s missing from old book smell, and it’s what makes New Sibet into a wearable expression of old book smell. It smells not just like books but like their context, the people crowding in around them, the bodies sinking time as lived experience into the leather covers of old books through their human smell.
Atelier Cologne Oud Saphir - RS
I have never owned a new car. Every car I ever held the keys to was a hand-me-down, either from my parents (the navy blue Volvo station wagon I drove in high school in Albuquerque, rumbling back and forth to early morning choral practices and late night theater rehearsals, all the way blasting Ani DiFranco’s Not a Pretty Girl, all the way yelling out the windows that I would be the million that a man never made, long before I had lived enough to understand the lyrics), or from a resale dealership (the eggshell Infiniti boat I drove around the chilly streets of Northern California in college, sometimes deeply, irresponsibly stoned, crawling along at 15mph from a friend’s room back to my own, petrified of getting caught sliming at a snail’s pace over the backroads. Mostly, that car was a proto-Uber-but-for-drunk-teens careening through Silicon Valley right before the second boom; I was an RA in a huge freshman dorm, and most of my late nights involved my tipsy charges paying me in milkshakes to shuttle them to the off-campus Jack-In-The-Box or Krispy Kreme, sometimes two or three times before sunrise. I really didn’t mind. I love any flimsy excuse to drive, even now.). I had to give up my secondhand sedan when I moved across the country to New York City -- which I did the day after graduation; I didn’t even drive my own car the 23 hours back to New Mexico -- and leaving that car behind was the hardest part of the move. But I knew I couldn’t bring it. Not only because New York is best experienced as a walking city (or it should be, f--k you very much Robert Moses), but because I knew that I am not the type of person who could be trusted with urban vehicle responsibilities. I have many friends who live in the city and manage to own cars like actual adults and not descend into madness, but that life is not for me. I will never be an adult when it comes to proper automotive etiquette. I tend to forget where I park a car the moment I walk away from it. I still get a ticket every time I am in Los Angeles, even when I have triple-checked the meter. I am certainly not logistically empowered enough to move a hunk of metal around every morning to comply with an arbitrary street cleaning schedule. I have friends with cars whose main topic of conversation is how triumphant they feel to have found a good spot. I wanted to talk about other victories.
That said, I still sometimes feel an ache where my keys should be. I am a child of the desert, where cars are as vital as limbs, where they are essential tools for self-knowledge, for spreading out your reach across the arroyos and into the narrow passes between pink mountains. In New Mexico, you can get a permit at 14; many of us were putting miles on the odometer before puberty hit. We start early because there is very little else to do, very little else to long for besides permission to peal out into the dust. On hot, dry summer evenings, the place to see and be seen was always the road; we would cruise Central Avenue like we could transpose Dazed and Confused onto the nineties, piled four or five in the backseat, blaring “How Bizarre” by OMC as we waved across the intersection at classmates driving the exact same loop, blaring the exact same song. We would drive ten miles down the avenue that was once glamorous -- the former Route 66, with its dilapidated mid-century motels and kitschy signage -- then back up again, pulling into a big supermarket parking lot at the base of the foothills lit up by the rainbow glow of a downmarket mini-golf course. We tumbled out, stretched our legs, swapped drivers, and did it all over again. This was our entertainment and it was our freedom. I remember holding two thoughts simultaneously on these nights: 1) I cannot wait to get out of this town where there is nothing to do but drive, where culture begins and ends at the steering wheel, and 2) I don’t want to ever be anywhere but here, passing the orange Hiway House Motel that blares “Sleep is our Business!” in blue neon, slurping down twenty-four ounces of Sonic cherry limeade, everyone who I’ve told secrets to crammed into my backseat, where we don’t know yet that Santana’s “Smooth” is a song that is also a punchline, where we all sing “Man, it’s a hot one” in bopping unison because man, it is a hot one, out here on the mesa, it’s a hot one and we have air conditioning and 24-hour breakfast burrito drive-thrus and each other.
Atelier Cologne’s Oud Saphir smells exactly like a new car. The “oud” in its name is a deception, because it doesn’t dry down to the golden pepper zing that most agarwood scents do. It is purely, decidedly fresh coupe: the taut leather upholstery and buttered suede, the noxious play-doh scent of untouched plastic, the chintzy cardboard tree swinging from the rearview, all of the hope and hubris of a pristine man-made machine before human error comes to break it in and break it down. Every car I called mine had already lost this bravado before I got to it; my cars were snowballs of previous aromas -- spilled coffees and cleat dirt and a shrunken tangerine forgotten in the glove compartment. I was glad about it; I didn’t have anything to defile, no pretense of purity. I could just press the gas and go. But when it comes to perfume, I crave this scent of newness, gooey like a bambino calf. It is an olfactory dare, a provocation: break me in, break me down. Some people say this perfume is an exact dupe of Tom Ford’s insanely popular Tuscan Leather, and they are right, it’s nearly the same unrubbed suede that is all the more dirty for being so clean. And yes, the Atelier costs about the same for 100ml, but it is an absolue, which means it lasts absolutely forever, even through showers, even through long drives. When I wore it last, someone told me I smelled “very expensive,” which is precisely what fresh leather scents are supposed to be: they smell like the keys to a 2018 Lexus, the inside of a Birkin. I don’t want either of those things. I never have. But I like the trick of making people wonder: Why, all of a sudden, am I seeing you like new? Where on earth have you been, and where will the road take you next?