2017-03-21 The Dry Down #7: The Sunday Six / Gourmands
Hello again and welcome to The Sunday Six, which we realize we are sending out on a Wednesday this week. We know, we know. We need to get our shit together. But in the meantime, FORGIVE US. Just to recap, The Sunday Six is our joint version of The Dry Down, where we give you six 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: GOURMANDS. Gourmand is the technical name for a perfume family in which the notes smell like food. But not savory food (though if you really wanted to find it, there is a perfume out there that smells exactly like Doritos) -- gourmands are olfactory sweet shoppes; they smell like chocolate and butter and almonds and cinnamon and vanilla and coffee and caramels. They are usually one of the first types of scent that people get into as teenagers, because we are already programmed to believe that cookies smell amazing, and well, why wouldn't you want to smell like a human cookie? But they are also one of the scent families that people who hate perfume tend to vehemently denounce as too sweet, too cloying, too MUCH; they are easy to decry, because they rarely feel grown up, or they feel like they are pure confectionary adornment, literal icing on the body meant to lure in the opposite sex with the promise of candy and sprinkles. They can make a person feel a little bit like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. And yet: they are still so popular. Vanilla is the #1 note that customers, both men and women, ask for in perfume shops (it's true! We asked!). It is hard to shake the dream of smelling like a milkshake. And so, here are six gourmands, for better or worse. Some we love, some we have trouble with, but it is worth seeing what works for you in the waning days of winter. Tip: gourmands tend to go over better in the cold. Smelling like hot cocoa in 100 degree weather is a weird look, and it can turn very bad very quickly. These are the kinds of scents you want lingering on your scarves; you want them to waft out of your sweater box when you open it next year.
Helena:
1) Cafe Intense, Montale
Starbucks introduced the Frapuccino in 1995, when I was eleven years old and living just outside of San Francisco. Starbucks was still kind of a regional chain then (which is to say they were everywhere but most proliferative in the Pacific Northwest), and we were among the first city to get the frappuccino. At my suburban middle-school, kids talked about frappucinos like they were the newest cool pair of sneakers, the must-have accessory. This frothy caloric coffee drink became, somewhat absurdly, a signifier of pre-teen cool. I remember going to Starbucks with other kids, watching everyone order and take possession of frappuccinos; it seemed like so much to have at once, the cup overflowing with pillowy whipped cream and syrup drizzles, the interior stuffed thick with this bizarre liquid substance that couldn’t quite be compared to anything else (most other coffee chains attempted to make their own frappuccino and none of them even came close). Wanting a frappuccino, ordering a frappuccino, having a frappuccino be, briefly, yours, all of these were better than actually drinking one, which is a particularly American way of relating to any kind of consumption.
Frappucinos are the official food of the mall. They are the coffee version of what the perfume counters in a medium-upscale department store like Nordstrom’s smell like at the height of a weekend shopping day, all musk and hope and pink laundry chemicals and monstrous artificial giant flowers. I haven't had a frappuccino in years but that doesn't mean I don't want one. I still kind of want a frappuccino all the time, each day, at every moment, in the same way that I semi-secretly always want to go spend a day at the mall.
Starbucks makes frappuccinos, the “classic” ones that include coffee, anyway, with their own specific Starbucks Frappuccino Roast Coffee Blend beans. It both horrifies and fascinates me to imagine what these coffee beans would taste like made into a simple unalloyed cup of coffee. That cup of frappuccino-coffee would probably taste a lot like Montale’s perfumes, Cafe Intense in particular, smell. Montale primarily makes gourmands, with a capital G and maybe capital all the other letters, too. They’re sticky and guilty and sweeter than they should be, loud and heavy and utterly indiscreet. They smell, objectively, bad. But, at least on me, some of them smell great, too. Cafe Intense smells like the way that I still want a frappuccino. It doesn’t smell really at all like what its advertising copy says it smells like, that clean-dirt rush of sticking your face into a bag of newly-ground coffee beans, which is one of my favorite smells and something I have yet to find in a perfume (if you know one, please recommend it to me!). Cafe Intense smells, instead, like the way that a caramel frappuccino seems, in hindsight, to stand for all the rotting high-flying innocence that brought the 1990s to a close; what it felt like to be thirteen in 1997 and clutch a giant cup of coffee and sugar and whipped cream and caramel syrup in both hands to lift it off a counter: all of this, all for me.
Rachel:
2) Lubin, Korrigan
Gourmand scents are always a little embarrassing; they are the fragrance equivalent of kissing your fingers with your lips to indicate that a sauce is particularly delicious (or that a subtweet was a sufficiently scalding burn). They are embarrassing because they are so obvious. Obviously, vanilla smells good. The human palate is meant to crave sugar, it is one of the four basic tastes that evolution has caused our tongues to hunt for, and of the four it is the least complex. Sugar is instantly gratifying and calorically empty; it cannot sustain a body, but it can briefly delight it before too much makes it sick. It’s fast and cheap and often disappointing, but sweets are one of the first pure pleasures that we learn about, untethered to any benefits or deeper motive. Sugar is an ornamental indulgence that children feel immediately entitled to like a primal right from the moment they discover it; the pursuit of candy feels like the main reason to exist between the ages of six and ten. It is the first gummy green light, long before we know how to stretch towards more ineffable and more painful ambitions. When I was seven, I went for the first time to the Sweet Factory in the mall -- one of those by-the-bag maltose heavens with bin after bin of Haribo sharks and chocolate-covered popcorn -- and I had to be taken out of the store crying. I wasn’t upset because I was being deprived; I was instead upset because there were too many candies and I didn’t know where to start. I was so completely overwhelmed by the potential happiness of the sweets, by the joy they could bring me, that my little body began to shake and crumble and melt down. I couldn’t handle getting everything I ever wanted all in one place, and so I sabotaged my own bonbon spree. That may be a metaphor for something. It is certainly the plot of many Roald Dahl books.
What I am trying to say is that gourmand perfumes tend to do the same thing to me, even now: they smell like far too much bliss, all the decadent nutmeat of life shoved into a single bottle, and I simply cannot handle it. I’m flustered by it and always slightly nauseous; I feel much more comfortable when sweetness is cut with something bitter, when the honey is laced with horseradish. Too many gourmands are all top and base notes: a gooey benzoin river running underneath fluttery marzipan frosting; they lack the spicy, unctuous middle punch that takes a perfume from hollow to haunting. Wearing these perfumes is like eating dessert first: it always seemed like the ultimate fantasy, this forbidden inversion of cake and vegetables. But then, when you are old enough to control the order of your own meals, you know that starting with ice cream gives your stomach vertigo.
I realized that if I was going to love a gourmand, it had to have some protein in it; it had to smell like cracking a creme brulee at exactly the right moment, when you are already full and you couldn’t have another bite, but hey, if everyone is willing to share, I’ll take a spoon. It needs to smell like the end of a long dinner when everyone has ordered a double espresso even though they don’t usually drink it, because one person at the table ordered one and everyone just said “you know what, that sounds good, I’ll take the same.” It needs to smell like ordering something rich just to prolong a really good conversation; to keep the outside world at bay for just a few minutes longer with the lure of whipped cream. It needs to smell like candles burning themselves out, like the waitstaff sending out not so subtle signs that they’d like to go home. Lubin’s Korrigan smells like that. It smells mostly like smoke, and then finally at the end of its life it bursts into a salted caramel ribbon. It is a muscular scent that blooms at the last possible instant; that gives off a honeyed death rattle. This sweetness at the very end feels like a last confession, a satisfied smile on the way out. It may still be embarrassing, but it has earned its schmaltz; and anyway, it’s over so quickly that you may find yourself in mourning.
Helena:
3) Bulgari Black
Bulgari Black isn’t really a gourmand, I’m kind of cheating here. I bought a bottle of this last week after every person whose perfume opinion I trust recommended it in the most glowing and persuasive terms (“like S&M summer camp, but good,” was maybe my favorite). While this celebrated perfume in its hockey-puck bottle has gourmand notes (vanilla, tea), it’s not really a gourmand. It’s not really anything, except itself. Luca Turin’s summary description of it is “hot rubber,” which is as accurate a portrait as it’s possible to offer. Rubber is the overwhelming note here, and it should be off-putting but isn’t at all. Unlike so many perfumes I love, nothing of what draws me to wear this one is about ugliness. Black manages the strange feat of smelling like rubber and leather without smelling combative. It combines new car smell with the smell of a spatula accidentally left sitting on a hot pan in the kitchen, and in taking the average of these two disparate experiences, sums the equation to pure comfort. Vanilla and amber, both of which I often find cloying and juvenile in other perfumes, instead glow at the heart of this, bathing the leather and rubber surrounding them in luxury, summoning the idea of sliding into the back of an expensive car. Bulgari Black doesn’t use a traditional scent pyramid, which means it has no top notes or basenotes, but rather offers up everything it has to say all at once, green and dark and sweet all immediate in its first waft. Maybe this intelligent attack is why it feels so much like being swept up in something larger than oneself, and why it smells so intrinsically like something or someone you can trust. A lot of people have mentioned how sexy it is, or how it smells like sex. They aren’t wrong, but the way in which it smells like sex is completely different from what its bottle and the phrase “hot rubber” might make one imagine. Bulgari Black smells like the really good sex you have when you know and trust someone deeply enough to do all the weird shit with them, when nothing is too embarrassing or too human anymore, the kind of deep intimacy that gets truly fucking strange, the twisted little secrets we keep for years with someone we’ve found permanent and trustworthy enough to deserve them. A friend of mine once said about a long relationship that she didn’t mind domesticity, but she wanted rock ‘n’ roll domesticity. Maybe this is that. Bulgari Black smells like coming home to a kitchen where someone you love has been cooking all day, but without smelling remotely tamed. It smells like a bed, and it smells like running away from home. (Also, it’s cheap as hell and you can buy it on amazon, if that's your thing).
Rachel:
4) Byredo, Seven Veils
I have a real love/hate relationship with Byredo, a perfume line that launched in 2006 and over the last decade has come to define a specific kind of cosmopolitan vanity; I knew that a fizzy energy was coalescing around it when the squat round bottles started to appear in almost every Into The Gloss Top Shelf story around 2010. Every woman in New York seemed to be buying Gypsy Water in the same year, dousing themselves in bergamot in order to commune with young, effervescent Stevie Nicks sitting for makeup in that viral Wild Heart video. The problem is, Gypsy Water costs $150 and it fades within moments of application; it seems incongruous to want to be a White Witch and yet choose an elixir lacking potency. But, hey, it doesn’t hurt that its founder, Ben Gorham, looks like a movie star (like Rudolph Valentino if he was a Brooklyn beardo, to be exact), or that the sans-serif labels look incredibly fresh and beautiful on a sink. Even though the bottles are black and white, Byredo is the millennial pink of fragrance lines. It is ubiquitous and unisex and utilitarian while still providing a deep sense of calm that yes, you are making correct aesthetic choices for your exact moment in time. It is an easy cool, which is perhaps why I have never felt quite in step with it. Many of their scents are absolutely perfect on a lot of people; and I tend to like them so much better on others. I once stalked a girl around a book party because she smelled like a new wallet; it turns out she was wearing Bullion, a scent that on me skews closer to shoe polish. But on her: a dream! So who knows! Perfume is a very intimate and particular thing!
I will say that I am in rapturous love with one of their perfumes, and it is the odd runt that doesn’t fit into the rest of the line. Where most of Byredo’s juices are clear, Seven Veils is (at least in some formulations) a deep sherbet color, like a translucent bellini. Its main note is, unmistakably, carrot. Here’s something to know: carrots are fantastic in perfumes. You know how when you are sautéing really fresh carrots in butter there is a moment that they smell like honey, but also like the soil they came from? Well, that is exactly how they smell in Seven Veils. Seven Veils is the only gourmand scent in the world that I actually wish I could eat; it’s the most comforting, sumptuous, delicious fragrance (and believe me, I hate the word delicious to describe the inedible; it’s just there is no other possible word for this). I have recommended this perfume to two separate people who now wear it as a signature scent. It’s the kind of beauty that, if it connects with you, makes a bid for eternal monogamy.
Helena:
5) Mugler, Angel
It’s sort of shameful that we’ve gone this long writing to you about perfume and we haven’t yet talked about Angel. When Angel came out in 1992, it was a bit like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring but for perfume. If it didn’t actually cause riots, it did spread the kind of sudden and intentional shock that leads to permanent notoriety. It’s both one of the most despised and one of the most ubiquitous perfumes ever made. Angel’s invention of what I’d personally call “upsetting gourmand” defined a whole generation of imitators. It’s not just that Angel smells both masculine and feminine at once, juxtaposing pointedly dissonant notes (white flowers and patchouli, cotton candy and musk); plenty of perfumes had done that before, reaching all the way back to Tabac Blond in 1919 and probably even further than that. Rather, it’s that it performs both masculinity and femininity with such flamboyant aggression. “Angry chocolate,” is a phrase one might say as a joke, but it’s also an exact description of what Angel smells like. It smells like chocolate, and like anger, and like jokes about how women want chocolate when they get their period, and like being angry about jokes about how women want chocolate when they get their period. Also, at utterly random intervals as it dries down, it smells like the most masculine musk-and-patchouli man-scent that any bro who’s ever with total sincerity purchased one of those expensive hot-towel-shave experiences that comes with a glass of scotch could ever want.
I’d never actually worn Angel before. I knew about it in terms of its place in perfume history, its references and influences and the various celebrities who claim to wear it. I’d heard that it smells different on everyone, I'd heard that it's impossible to wear, and that it can clear a room. Today I tried it for the first time. Here’s my report on what Angel smells like: It smells like Angel. As soon as I put it on I recognized it, the same heart-beat stumble when a scent slams into my memory centers with an unexpected familiarity. I sat there trying to figure what it smelled like that felt so deeply known to me, and then I realized the thing I was remembering was this perfume itself. There was a long moment in the 1990s, right when I was at that age when we’re all little greenhouses for memory, when every adult woman around me must have been wearing Angel. I was suddenly aware that at least one out of every three women at the parties my parents threw in the 1990s was wearing this perfume. It smelled like walking into a room full of adults having a dinner party. I suppose this is what great perfumes are trying to do, to so thoroughly define a moment in time through smell that the description of that smell ceases to be a comparison and becomes only the thing itself, the name of the perfume as the dominant note in the perfume.
There was a split second about twenty or thirty minutes into my wearing of Angel when it smelled absolutely heavenly on me, when the white flowers and the chocolate sang a neat harmony and I thought, oh I see, I get it, I love this. Ten minutes later it smelled exactly like the plastic from which Barbies are made. Thomas tried it on, too, and after even less time than me decided it was his new favorite scent; it smelled like the darkest possible chocolate, mixed with heady spices. Twenty minutes after that he was trying to convince me that he wasn’t mad at me for making him try it on and making the face he makes when he takes out the kitchen garbage. I may or may not have reached out to pet my cat a little too soon after spraying this one; Angel smells better on her than on either myself or Thomas. Cat fur seems to arrest the scent at its sweetest berry notes.
There’s a specific type of feminism that flourished in the 1990s and still plagues us today, a bright tough sharp-shoes corporate woman striding into a boardroom with her nails done and her hair shellacked into a helmet. She talks louder than the conversation requires, and she doesn’t really think about hardships beyond her own, but she thinks about those a whole lot. She’s a big part of the reason so many people hated Hillary Clinton so deeply by the time we got to 2016, and she is so full of rage, a lot more rage than her circumstances really should logically generate. Angel smells like this sort of strident, corporate feminism; let me be clear, in case I haven’t been: it smells bad. But it also smells fascinating, something beyond the lady CEO one immediately imagines wearing it, something stranger and more seductive than its initial devotees might ever have envisioned, a knowing drag performance of power suit feminism. Angel is ugliness like a dare, a confession of the ugliness in the screeching heart of traditional female beauty. It smells not like how a Lana Del Rey song sounds (try Carnal Flower or Sarrasins) but like the emotion behind those songs, the furious, wronged swagger of any hard femme - regardless of their gender - who walks out into the world clad in their bright pink armor.
Rachel:
6) Indult, Tihota
Duane Reade saved a lot of us. We don’t talk much about it now, because many of us have become New Yorkers, and New Yorkers love to affect a very specific type of urban amnesia; a collective memory loss that transforms the places that sustained us during our first lonesome years in the city into gauche jokes. We love to turn our lifelines into punchlines. In fact, one marker of being a “real” New Yorker is the moment in which you can pass a Duane Reade and not immediately want to go in, when you start to loathe the fluorescent lighting and dart into the pharmacy only when you really, really have to, and only on hyper-focused tactical missions. Get in, grab paper towels and mouthwash, get the fuck out. If you have heard more than one Ed Sheeran song, you’ve been in too long. There's no time to linger over which conditioner smells the most like coconuts and rain; that’s how the vortex pulls you in. Duane Reade, to most hardened, sneering city mice, is at best a necessary utility, and at worse a circle of hell. It is not a space for play or contemplation. Even the souped up shiny dual-level versions that look like bizarro Sephoras and sell every cream from La Roche Posay (my friend Adam once called these glistening establishments “Duanedorf Reademans” when we went into one very stoned for Talenti and garbage magazines and I’ll never use another name for them) are not really places you want to see and be seen; if you are in a Duane Reade, you spend most of the time hoping that no one ever notices you there. Even if you step into a Duane Reade in black tie, you will immediately feel like you are wearing those fleece pants covered with poop emoji that have never flattered a single human body. Even if you enter a Duane Reade flushed with radiant good health, you leave feeling withered and bruised, like a peach left out on a counter for too long. The lighting turns your skin a sickly green; your complexion goes lunar, full of craters and odd shadows. Wisdom: never take a fresh date to a Duane Reade; too much will be revealed, you will be in Act III of a tragedy before you can even hear the overture. New Yorkers know all of this. It’s why we choose to forget.
But dig a little deeper, and you will find that we all have a buried gratitude for these monster drugstores, these 24-hour havens with long aisles and blessedly few staff members, these spaces where it is possible to disappear for two hours and never have to explain yourself, where you can spend half an afternoon sniffing body washes and comparing cheap red lipsticks and wandering, wandering, wandering. When you are new and unbefriended in New York and the nights can feel endless, Duane Reade is a place to go, and that is all it has to be. In 2005 I was 21 and living in a studio so small that the bed was lofted over the kitchen sink (and as a result, roaches would regularly decide that my comforter would be a lovely final resting place); I hated being in that apartment by myself late at night. It was a phenomenally dumb decision, looking back, to live alone in the city right away, but I moved here not knowing a single person, at least not well enough to move in with, and I knew nothing about neighborhoods, at least not well enough to know I should have aimed my arrow straight at Brooklyn. That tiny cubby on W. 12th Street over the Beatrice Inn felt like rented Purgatory, a place for my body to hover until I could learn which pockets of the city felt like they were holding space just for me. It served its function. Still, I hated going back there after the long days I spent assisting an editor at a magazine, so I walked around a lot instead. I logged miles and miles downtown after dark (sorry mom) listening to Hot Chip and smoking Parliament Lights; I took myself to movies at the Angelika, I ate soup dumplings at Grand Sichuan and falafel plates at Moustache, I squatted in the downstairs biography section of The Strand, I ate fried egg sandwiches at La Bonbonierre, I ordered $3 beers at Corner Bistro and tried to read novels by the light of stubby votive candles. I was alone, but I rarely felt lonely during that time. Sometimes I even miss those first months, when I never wanted to be at home. I realize now that I was tracing a home for myself with my feet. I did have pangs of dizzy homesickness, when I started to doubt my ability to stay put. And when I needed the kind of comfort that only comes from a bear hug or by being surrounded by familiar shampoo brands, I would go to the 24-hour-Duane Reade. There, I would loiter in the beauty section smelling products that were cloying and sweet, that smelled like being 14 again, covered in sugary body splashes from a not dissimilar drugstore 2000 miles away, when I was always burning for the city, whispering its name in incantations. I smelled these synthetic scents -- vanilla cookie lotion, cotton candy lip gloss, marshmallow mousse -- and understood right away what my deep inner teen needed me to do, which was to hold on, to stick it out one more day. I remember on one of these DR sojourns I bought a huge container of whipped body butter from Jessica Simpson’s trashy, hilarious Dessert line (if you have forgotten or are too young to remember: these were body products that you could also consume like food; technically I could have ingested the lotion like a tub of Fage. I didn’t.). I remember slathering that goop on in that tiny studio apartment to pass the time, and that it made the entire room smell like snickerdoodles. I know that I was intensely comforted by that then, and I also know that when I moved to Brooklyn with three roommates six months later, I promptly threw it out and started to pretend, as all New Yorkers do, like I never went to Duane Reade for any other reason than to get tampons and selzer with maximum efficiency.
This is all to say that most gourmand scents are the scents of our youth, and they therefore risk becoming immediately embarrassing to us when we are done with them. There is something humiliating about once having wanted to smell exactly like a peanut butter cup because it was the most decadent thing you could imagine with your limited experience. But it’s the treacly crucible through which we all pass, and no amount of amnesia can undo that. It makes perfect sense to me that Duane Reade is now the main distributor of Demeter, a line of perfumes that attempt to mimic exact real world smells, including Junior Mints, Tootsie Rolls, angel food cake, chocolate chip cookies, and condensed milk. I’m not sure who is buying these scents, but I can tell you exactly who is standing there for long minutes smelling them one by one: lonely people, new in town, who have come to bathe in the halogen glow and smell their childhoods.
When you grow out of this practice, it’s easy to leave it all behind. For a long time, I did not wear gourmand perfumes. Even the fanciest scents smelled to me like spoonable body butter. They smelled too desperate for connection, too blatant about their yearning. But lately, I have stopped denying that I started out here like everyone else, lonely and craving comfort and ready to find it in a bottle. When I want to honor to that person, the one who stuck it out, I put on Indult’s Tihota. It is the sweetest saccharine syrup, like vanilla ice cream melted into soup and then steam distilled. It smells like being a teenager, but also like being old enough to be glad that those years are finally long behind you, and that you can choose to forget. It smells like walking past a Duane Reade and pretending like you’ve never been in, like you’ve never sighed alone in those aisles, like you've never substituted cheap vanilla lotion for a hug, like you've never needed a lifeline.
The Duanedorf Reademan’s one was perfection.