The Dry Down Six: Aldehydes
Hi Dry Downers!
Welcome to a new edition of The Six, in which we each pick three perfumes around a theme. This week, we are diving into the wild world of aldehydes. What in the world is an aldehyde? Glad you asked. Fragrantica defines the aldehyde family as “a vast group of components of organic origin reproduced in the lab,” which is basically another way of saying they are kind of magical chemistry reactions that reproduce elements like oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, but for use in scent. Or from Wikipedia: “The chemical formula for an aldehyde functional group is -CH=O, and the general formula for an aldehyde is R-CH=O. The aldehyde group is occasionally called the formyl or methanoyl group.” Still confused? Don’t worry, so are we. But to put it more simply, aldehydes are aromachemical amplifiers. They pump up a fragrance, giving it a kind of carbonated, or “fizzy” top. They sometimes turn a perfume soapy, or lemony, or bright — sort of like a dash of zest or a twist of citrus rind on the rim of a cocktail glass. Some aldehydes — like formaldehyde, that famous frog-dissection goo — smell absolutely rank. But others, the ones you find in fine perfumery, like benzaldehyde and furferal — smell light and fluttery, like the first full day of spring. They are the wispy feathers of the fragrance organ, the finishing touches that can vault a scent from ordinary to celestial. So. Here are six scents that rely on aldehydes as their special sauce. - R and H
Tauer Perfumes, Noontide Petals - HF
One of the most common ways one sees aldehydes described is as "sparkling" - a basic understanding of these notes is that they act in perfume as bubbles do in champagne or prosecco, transforming cheap white wine into a holiday, a celebration. Aldehydes, then, could be thought of as a congratulatory smell, a burst of applause in scent, which is exactly how Noontide Petals smells to me. Andy Tauer crafted the scent as a tribute to aldehydes, using them to sum up a whole past era of perfume, a time he refers to as its "glittering age." This is a self-consciously old-fashioned perfume, one that praises the wearer for wanting to be beautiful, and truly believes that wanting to be beautiful and being beautiful might be the same thing.
Written out in a list, its notes are prosaic, a yes-we've-seen-this-before progression of bergamot into white florals into a patchouli and musk base, the wildly unsurprising olfactory descent from daytime to afternoon to evening. But the magic of this perfume is the way it celebrates predictability and highlights the known paths, the traditions that are traditions for a reason. If modern perfume is often innovative to a fault, offering up scents that smell like gun barrels and elephant shit and dirty laundry, Noontide Petals is a counter-argument in a bottle, a passionate statement that what is good is not boring, and what is pleasurable and easy to wear does not have to be staid and conservative. This scent is the place to smell exactly what all the cliches about aldehydes mean, and how they came to be cliches in the first place. It glitters, it sparkles, it smells like light hitting a diamond. It is a party, a round of applause, the first champagne toast at a wedding. It is the obvious, expected, beautiful things that we sew back into our lives because the same visceral drive toward delight that animated our grandparents still animates us, springtime and parties and first kisses and pretty dresses and praise from the people whose approval matters most. Some things do not get old; some things are too good to be stylish.
Chanel No. 5 - RS
I absolutely did not want to include Chanel No. 5 here because, let’s face it, the perfume needs no further publicity nor mythologizing. As far as fine fragrance goes, it’s basically the only one everyone knows about, even the people who don’t like perfume and never intend to wear it. For some people, it stands in for the entire industry, synecdoche in a bottle: expensive, heavily branded, a little stuffy, attached to all kinds of legends that may or may not be true but which certainly help to spread its imperial lore. For all those reasons, and for the fact that the jury is still out on whether or not Coco aided and abetted known Nazis during the war, I thought: maybe let’s not discuss No. 5. But then, we can’t have a conversation about aldehydes without it. It is the ur-aldehyde, the reason this one ingredient pops off in so many designer scents and keeps chugging along year after year. It’s a blockbuster, a queenmaker, a pop song. I cannot avoid it. So I will try to explain it.
The big fact you must know No. 5 is that it is a heavy perfume. Not just on the body -- though it is that -- but it just drags so much baggage behind it, so many tall tales. At some point, it begins to be difficult to see through the juice. Did Coco name the perfume, the first she ever launched (in 1922), for her lucky number, a number drilled into her as holy and divine by the nuns at the Cistercian convent where she spent her childhood? Or did she simply pick the fifth lab batch her chemist brought her, and she recognized that the banal numerical label on the sample was snappier than anything else she might come up with? We may never know! Coco was a marketing genius. This we do know. The name is savvy as hell: it sounds like a hotel room, a lucky lottery ticket, a quintet of golden rings.
But nothing is more intoxicating than what’s inside the flacon which has more or less always been a plain glass rectangle with a sans serif label, an iceberg of simplicity that design students still study as an example of streamlining an idea until it is edible and candy-glossed. If you want to read three hundred pages on the bottle design, there is a book for that. No. 5 is perhaps the only perfume that has its own major biography (more than one, actually!), that demands anthropological dissection. Because it has been so many things: Marilyn Monroe’s nighttime negligee (again, maybe just a myth!), the professional Parisian socialite Misia Sert’s secret for drawing people into her gilded orbit, Frida Kahlo’s comfort blanket, every department store’s crown jewel. It’s not really even a perfume anymore, its a passport, a calling card, a teleportation device, a dynasty, a burden.
But what makes it function as a scent are the aldehydes, those fizzy bursts of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen that give the rose and jasmine and civet a shot of adrenaline, as if a coach is pumping them with illegal steroids before a boxing match. The original perfumer, Ernest Beaux, said that he wanted to make the scent smell like winter, the way snow isolates and amplifies other outdoor smells but also seems to clean them, as if their rawness is embarrassing. What he really meant was: I want this to smell like money. Like always feeling warm. Aware of the cold, and impervious. Beyond crisp, to the place where crisp turns erotic. So, if that’s your thing, here it is.
Frederic Malle, Iris Poudre - HF
People are scared of smelling like old ladies because nobody wants to smell like death. But so many of the best perfumes smell like the particular way glamorous older women remind us of mortality. If you love perfume, eventually you are going to have to reckon with Miss Havisham, specifically with the Miss Havisham who lives in your own heart, and the fastest route to doing that is to seek out the absolute most powder-bomb floral perfume you can find. Frederic Malle's famous, gorgeous Iris Poudre is a perfect place to start.
Iris Poudre is one of the two perfumes that comes most immediately to mind when I think of "old lady perfumes," or when someone says they don't want to smell like an old lady and I think that they don't know what they're missing. Old ladies have all the best stories; old ladies are family secrets and murder mysteries; the clues you failed to notice; the rambling, boring conversation that starts out as small talk and turns and turns into something darker and stranger, riveting, making all the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Everything you have done that you think is cool, or shocking, or humiliating or sad, old ladies have already done, and done more and done better.
Malle's official website description figures this perfume as "a woman in a tailored suit" and "passion under ice." The aldehydes act as formal manners and restraints holding back the unbridled emotions of the tumbling list of floral, musk, and gourmand notes that make up the rest of the fragrance - iris, musk, tonka bean, rose, violet, ylang ylang all encased in a cut-glass barrier of sharp aldehyde and cool, masculine vetiver. But to me, this formality reads a little different - it's a chilly grandeur, and a kindly threat. It's a beautifully dressed older woman welcoming you into her magnificent home, where the fine furniture is covered over with ghostly white cloth, and where secrets lurk under every gilded surface. It's the sharp flash in the eyes of someone who moments before seemed to only be a doddering sweet little old lady, when you realize she knows where all the bodies are buried.
Givenchy Ysatis - RS
The eighties were more or less a hilarious time for perfume, and therefore a glorious decade for aldehydes. Aldehydes are the shoulderpads of perfume, little touches that exaggerate everything else and quickly turn a composition from understated to blaring. They are not day-glo itself, but they are the chemistry that makes day-glo possible, if that makes sense. When you think of the “power perfumes” of the Me Decade, the kind that clears elevators, the scents that the bouffanted bitches clomping around in coral pumps wore as they plotted how to disappear their asshole bosses the way the heroes of 9 to 5 did, the noxious jasmine clouds that deliver headaches just by proximity: those fragrances are all hopped up on aldehydes. If perfumes are basically very fancy wearable chemical smoothies, then aldehydes are the extra boosts you add in for $1, the wheatgrass and ginger shots of aromachemistry. Of course, in a time of aesthetic excess, perfumers were going to use every tool available to supersize their creations; the added so many boosters that the final product often smelled like playing every note on a Casio at once.
Ysatis is one of my very favorite vintage scents, but I understand that it is fully ridiculous. It contains...maybe every ingredient? Ylang-ylang, coconut, rose, galbanum, rosewood, amber, vanilla, iris [PAUSE FOR BREATH], narcissus, jasmine, sandalwood, honey, patchouli, civet, oak moss, orange blossom, tuberose, bergamot, rum, carnation (AND THIS IS JUST A PARTIAL LIST). I mean, what? Writing is editing! So is perfuming! I guess no one told Dominique Ropion! But what’s surprising about this gloppy glorious fruitcake of ideas is that the glaze of aldehydes on the top almost make the maximalism seem...sensical. Like, if you are going to turn it up to 11, why not just rock the fuck out? This is a perfume you headbang to, a big sloppy kiss, a dogpile of pleasure.
Estee Lauder, White Linen - HF
I've written here before about smelling like the mall, and how I truly - and perhaps unjustifiably, I'm very willing to be told I'm wrong - believe that everyone who loves perfume must, on some level, however secret, want to smell like the fancy mall. If you grew up in any kind of suburb, or even in a large city (especially in recent years as cities have begun to more and more closely resemble wealthy suburbs themselves), then you understand what I mean by the fancy mall. The fancy mall might have marble floors. Most of the things in it are white, starting with the floors and the walls. The ceiling is probably glass, but the light filters through all the white floors and white walls around it that by the time it gets into the mall it seems lighter, as though scrubbed. There might be a fake palm tree, or a large number of them; there might be a fountain or some other kind of water-involving decor. The food court calls itself a "hall" or a "market." The bathrooms are very clean. A fancy mall is a mall where every part of the mall feels like the beauty section of its largest department store; the spritzed florals from the marble-and glass funhouse of the perfume counters chase through the entire mall structure.
Estee Lauder's White Linen smells first and foremost like the fancy mall. As most aldehydes are in one way or another, it is an old lady perfume, but it is an old lady perfume in a very specific way. Launched in 1978, today it smells essentially the same as it did then, having been reformulated very little if at all. Its continued sameness almost literally preserves time in liquid; one can have the same experience purchasing an inexpensive bottle, opening it at home, inhaling deeply, and sprinkling it on one's skin, as one might have had in the late glory days of disco, in the dripping-hot oil-slick summer of a very different world, when all our parents were young. If White Linen is an old lady fragrance, it is because everyone gets old, because every young sexy girl becomes an old lady eventually. White Linen doesn't smell old; it smells young, achingly young, like a startling photograph of your grandmother buried in an old photo album, beautiful as heartbreak, smiling in a bikini. It smells like someone else's memory of their youth. In his five-star review of the fragrance, Luca Turin said it represented "the ideal of American sex appeal," but the America he meant was one of a past era, a place that may never have existed at all except in memory and in longing, where things like sex were bold-face and simple, their exteriors and interiors exactly the same, without mystery or betrayal. It is a photograph of an imaginary mid-century, in an imaginary America, a white bikini, a blonde woman, a sports car, the way some grown men still cry about Marilyn Monroe.
But I mention the mall because all of those things smell like a mall, or rather the mall smells like those things. In a fancy mall, it is always the American midcentury. Prosperity is possible and its claws are sheathed. Sex and youth are hopeful, pointing toward a new world. Every wound can be healed by buying something. Your family loves you; the future is not a threat but a promise. The mall most truly exists in summer, when the industrial-strength air conditioning cranks on, and that's what White Linen smells like, its heady clean-green sparkling vintage floral like all the love-me-back true-american relief of mall air conditioning on the hottest day of the year.
Serge Lutens, Dent de Lait - RS
Aldehydes have a creepy way of landing on extreme edges of the age spectrum: they either make a perfume smell like an ancient woman or like a baby, and rarely anywhere in between. The infant quality comes from the fact that aldehydes can skew “soapy” when paired with certain creamy notes like coconut and vanilla. Soap, in perfumery, is not the same idea as clean. Clean is like laundered linen (mostly cotton blossoms) or sharp citrus (bergamot oil, yuzu). Soapy is more like what happens when “fizzy” compounds meet sugary syrups, so that you get a kind of light strawberry freshness, a tub full of Mr. Bubble. For most people, soapy notes smell like something you surely experienced but cannot truly remember, that bliss of splashing around in a ceramic bowl as the primary method of washing and sleep-induction. They smell like being a baby, which of course we all were, but because our fontanelles were still doughy the memories aren’t super sharp or pungent. Just mild, tear-free, hypoallergenic.
Christopher Sheldrake, the mad scientist behind Serge Lutens, decided to take this concept literal a few years ago when he created Dent de Lait, a scent whose title translates into “baby teeth.” DDL is a terrifying and obsessive smell, at least to me, because it is so familiar and unfamiliar at once. It is like almond cookies on a cold metal tray, or like clotted cream dolloped on top of a 9-volt battery. It’s just so weird: metal and milk, all in the same glass. What it really smells like is biting down on a dental instrument as a child -- that painful zing that zips through your skull followed by bubblegum mouthrinse. Personally, I cannot stop smelling it. It’s bizarre and borderline nuts and I hope they make it forever.