Dear Dry Downers,
Hello! Welcome to a new edition of The Six, in which we each pick three scents around a theme and sort of...go where the wind takes us. Today, in honor of the last days of Spring, we are discussing the world of GREEN PERFUMES. So whether you want to smell like a forest, a cucumber, fresh-cut grass, green tea, or galbanum (what’s galbanum, you ask? Read on and find out!), we have you covered. ALSO, as an added bonus, the creator of the last perfume on this list, Tanwi Nandini Islam, has offered a special code to Dry Down readers (you’ll find details at the end of this e-mail, but also it is DryDown2018 and you can use it here). Everything’s coming up green!
Also, this newsletter is going out to all our subscribers (HELLO!). But earlier this year, we started a subscription service, which comes with personal perfume recs, access to our perfume diary, access to the full archive, and other goodies along the way. You can check that out here.
As always, thank you all for reading and supporting The Dry Down. You smell amazing.
XO R and H
Amazingreen, Comme des Garcons - HF
Green is my favorite color, but it’s not an easy color either to wear or to love. In the summer, greens come alive in the heart of the city where I live, punctuating the concrete the way a highlighter pen transforms a book’s pages. Thomas, my husband, moved here from down south, where it’s unbelievably green, everything lush and leaking, the air itself green with wet vegetal thickness. Houses hide in trees and lawns and the forest comes right up to the gas stations, always threatening to eat straight over the patches of civilization reluctantly carved out of the green. His family asks us, when they call or when we visit, how we can stand to live in New York. Don’t you miss the green? But it’s everywhere, I want to tell them, it’s right here, the whole city reeks of it. It’s hard to explain, though, because this is a city green, the green of public parks and hazy smoke in hot weather, the green of determined spindly trees shoving themselves up through the sidewalks and yelling neon over the wide streets at the first hinge of summer. It’s the green of public pools with moss encroaching on the edges, the sharp green smell of chlorine in the late afternoon air. It’s the green of hidden backyards clustered in the block between buildings and of stubborn roof gardens stuck like post-it notes in the skyline. It’s the green of the spilling-over foliage along Central Park West and the green of the highway signs that welcome you to Brooklyn, all equally artificial, all tremendously thirsty, working against the landscape around them, secure in their own failure and louder for it. Comme des Garcons’ Amazingreen, with notes of green pepper and ivy leaves and smoke and dew mist and gunpowder, smells like city green.
Jean-Christophe Herault, the nose behind Amazingreen, has said that he wanted it to smell like a “freshly renovated old house.” New paint smell is close to new car smell; both are about an artificial money-made hope, the smell of buying one’s way out into the clean air, the smell of purchased escape, second chances, starting over. The old house is greener than the car, though, because paint always smells a little green no matter the color, and an old house is always a reminder of the decay built up beneath it, that paint and tile and spackle can’t quite cover the bodily history, the dirt and vines and crumbling foundations, the life stored in the walls and beneath the stones. Green reaches across from the guilty, dirt-sticking accumulations of the natural world to the clean optimism of crisp paper bills.
Amazingreen smells like the aggressive emerald color of an expensive green evening gown, like the color of cars, like pool chemicals and green-dyed cake icing. It’s the sort of green that repels and attracts at once. Green is the color of envy, and the scent of green is the smell of obsessing over an ex’s social media, the smell of feeling bad when other people accomplish something, the tight fist-curl of gossip, of giving over to small and comforting cruelty, of possessiveness and invented scarcity, green-eyed and grasping, the color of snakes and alligators and things that lie in wait, open-eyed and hissing. In this way it smells like money, too, as money is always a kind of envy, a relentless never-enough, a hurried, wanting, wasteful green.
Sometimes that repulsion is what we crave, though. Herault describes the scent as opening with “a blast of green energy” and it feels that way, a blast propelling one outward, into the smell of a wet summer pavement just after fireworks (the gunpowder note). This green smells like the sick confidence of believing everything will turn out all right for no reason but that it always has before. Some greens smell like the end of the summer but this one smells like the beginning of it, the canon-fired belief that this time, at last, you might finally make the most of the greediest, greenest season.
At times I feel deficient when talking about green smells, because I didn’t grow up in a place where lushness was a value. Instead, it was a liability. In the high desert of New Mexico, it was not only considered gauche to have a sprawling, fertile lawn, it was thought of as profane, a symbol to the neighborhood that you were willing to drain community resources (quite literally) for a verdant patch of fescue to call your own.
I remember that when I was about seven years old, my father ripped up the small plot of Kentucky bluegrass in front of our house -- a souvenir left by the previous owners -- and replacing it with an arid, xeriscaped arrangement of pebbles and succulents and red clay. We still had some sod in the backyard -- mostly underneath the monkey bars, to break our falls more gently than gravel might -- but as a compromise we turned the front yard into a lava bed, full of plants that required zero irrigation and barely any human care. We reverted it to the days of the dinosaurs, when Coelophysis roamed around the Rio Grande basin on their hind legs, so hungry and parched that they often resorted to eating their own siblings. Where there had once been a rosebush, my father put in a giant, Triassic-era yucca plant with spines sharp as switchblades, which would sometimes shock us by sprouting a huge, phallic panicle of white blossoms. Where there had been a fluffy phalanx of Spanish broom, he put in a plump nopal cactus, with its barbled paddles like angry porcupines. Every so often, this cactus would drop sour pears, which fell onto the rocks with a gloppy thud and were often swarmed with fire ants before we had the chance to scoop them up. Now, prickly pears are considered a “superfood,” to be blended into probiotic moondust smoothies in order to regulate your inner alkalines or boost your peptides or some other vaguely new age promise, but when I was a child, the fruit was not coveted. It was a nauseous hot pink, covered in thorns, full of indigestible seeds. The taste was somewhere between a rotting banana and an overripe watermelon. It was edible, but rarely worth the effort. This was how I felt about our entire front garden -- it was not inviting, at least to children. Everything about it was designed to be gazed upon but not touched -- it was full of prongs, spurs, blades. Desert succulents are self-sufficient and self-protective; their existence is so tenuous and porcelain (in a good year, New Mexico will get eight inches of water) that they have adapted to live on scraps and to always expect the worst. These are living things with permanent hackles up, evolution has taught them to draw first blood to survive.
I think about this scorched plot of earth, dry as a bleached cow skull, when other people wax nostalgic about their childhood memories of bountiful green, of grass stains on their OshKosh, of the thick, milky scent of fresh cut lawns. I have no such scent memories, no roots that lead me back to trees. When I moved to Northern California for college, everyone asked me if it was bizarre to live next to the ocean for the first time in my life. Of course I said it was, but what I was embarrassed to admit was that I was far more bowled over by the excess of green than I ever was of the blue horizon. I didn’t know how to coexist with redwoods, with ancient leafy giants that invited you to wrap your arms around their trunks and whisper your secrets into their skin for safekeeping. The tall cane cholla cacti I grew up with could never be embraced; they were cold creatures in a hot climate. Once I left the desert behind, I started to gorge myself on this newfound tactile engagement with green. I was a hill roller, an outdoor reader, that person who always wanted to have a seminar al fresco. This continued in New York, a place that most people say is devoid of -- or at least short on -- natural beauty, but to me has always seemed indulgent when it comes to providing ways for humans to roll around in clover. Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park isn’t just a lawn, it’s a pasture with its own zip code, expressly designed for city dwellers to have a place to smash their faces into the earth. Of all the projects proposed by Olmstead and Vaux when they laid out Central Park, the Great Lawn was the most expensive undertaking and the one part of their vision about which they were wholly uncompromising. When you sit in Sheep’s Meadow, you are drinking in years of human effort required to turn the ground soft and dewy. I am the ideal glutton for Olmstead’s vision, because in New Mexico, we rarely saw dew at all.
As I get older, however, I miss the cacti. I miss remembering that some things are naturally unapproachable. That nature created living things that cannot be held. And that sometimes, you have to be the one to soak life up from behind your spines. This perfume, from one of my favorite new houses, reminds me of that. It’s vegetal and dry, like an unfiltered mineral wine. It’s not off-putting, but it is certainly not cuddly. It’s a green that bites back.
Most people (myself included, before reading up on it in order to write this) don’t actually know what galbanum is, although it’s a relatively common note to see in green perfumes. Reading about it, though, I realized that there was a reason scents like Nishane’s Ambra Calabria and Parfumerie Generale’s Papyrus de Ciane make me homesick in a way I had never quite understood before. This is both - to me, anyway - the most fun and most upsetting part of perfume as a hobby. Usually we experience our emotions in a relatively straightforward manner, an appreciable cause and a resulting effect. But scent works backward. It starts with the effect, summoning up joy or homesickness, longing or calm or rage, and then makes us chase down the cause. Why do certain jasmines make me sad and why do certain aldehydes makes me angry? Why does cashmeran smell like home? Why do I love patchouli when so many other people hate it? This big-mood detective work is where perfume really is as particular as the individual. I can tell you what something smells like to me and what those associations mean to me and therefore what effect I think this perfume will have on you and those who smell it on you, but I can’t actually be accurate, because your own separate associations, the places and times at which you have encountered certain scents in your life, will determine your experience of a scent so completely that what you smell and then feel may not resemble my description at all. The technical aspects of perfume science do some work against this utter subjectivity - eventually you can learn what to expect from a tuberose, an iris accord, a chypre. But even descriptions by the most brilliant, well-trained noses may read as completely unfamiliar to you when you’ve actually smelled something, because smell is nearly indistinguishable from memory and our memories are one of our very last inviolable specificities.
Green in modern perfumery can be traced back to a single origin, a gum resin yielded by plants that grow on the lower parts of mountain ranges in Northern Iran. In recent history, Galbanum gained wide acclaim when used in Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit (in its original form, a cold, disdainful green, the smell of knowing other people’s secrets before they know that you do) and then a little over a decade later and perhaps most famously in Balmain’s Vent Vert, a bright, highlighter-green scent that is basically the smell of turning Instagram’s “saturate” function all the way up on a photo of flowers. Galbanum’s use in scent goes back much further, though. Ancient Egyptians burned “green incense” made from galbanum to perfume their homes, and the plant has been used again and again to create personal scent. It is a green with a long history.
Many descriptions of galbanum simply describe it as smelling “green.” The smell winds back on itself: Green smells like green smells like green. Grass is perhaps the smell most of us associate most clearly with green, but galbanum doesn’t smell like grass at all. Nor does it smell like green trees, most of which smell either like their flowers (not green) or like aspects that will quickly turn a different color (pine trees are only green briefly). Galbanum smells sharp and woody and dank and to me it smells like a plant that is its distant cousin, the huge stalks of fennel-ish yellow-green blooms that grow in marshy areas near beaches and rivers in Northern California, places where I used to go on science-class field trips as a kid, where, lagging behind the rest of the group, we would break off pieces of these plants to smell the huge, bitter, resinous scent that erupted from where we broke their stems. Green starts out ugly. It isn’t soft, it doesn’t let you wait. Galbanum is a smell for people greedy for smell, an overwhelming and hard-to-name scent, and one that makes me impossibly homesick for a landscape I haven’t seen in years and wouldn’t ever quite have called home anyway.
Ambra Calabria is an amber scent, like the name says, which means parts of it are vanilla-ish and musky, but it’s a wonderfully strange green one. The opening notes are pure galbanum and green leaves, an overkill of green, a green hyperbole. On first blast it smells like putting your face inside a tree at night in summer. The southern green that Thomas’ family talks about when they call and ask if we miss green is a thick, jungle-like one, a mysterious, greedy green full of secrets, a green that lurks in the dark, the kudzu green that eats up cars and houses, that drags the landscape down into its own image. This overwhelming green, green as the animal mystery that lurks right along the edges of our day-to-day existence, is what Ambra Calabria smells like to me, and maybe what we were trying to get close to when we broke open those marsh plants as kids and inhaled their weird, bitter smell hungrily, wanting to know something larger than us, something too visceral for explanations. Ambra Calabria’s dark, lush, musky green is the green of places where cicadas purr and howl against huge leaves after dark, and the green in the trees at the edge of the water after the sun goes down. It smells like a green world at night, at once seductive and threatening, green as a wild and nervous unknown, leaves closing in behind you, a green as old and large as dinosaurs.
Ivy, Marc Jacobs - RS
The Marc Jacobs perfume empire is nothing if not…industrious. They cannot seem to stop making perfumes, and I personally find that it has reached the absurdist tipping point of hilarity -- like a stand-up gag that goes on for a one minute too long, and that tense minute of overhang is where the entire punchline lives. Whoever is running the Marc ship has pushed the concept of flankers to the next level - flankers, by the by, are perfumes that spawn out of other perfumes, perfumes that ride the backs of other perfumes like remoras. So what began as a single hit scent -- Marc Jacobs’ Daisy, a supersweet white floral with maple syrup drizzled over it -- has grown into a hydra with infinite heads. You have your Daisy Love, your Daisy Pop Art Edition, your Daisy Twinkle, and don’t forget Daisy Delight, and also Daisy Bloom, and for the lovers out there, Daisy Kiss. And then, to splatter the concept on even more walls, the most successful Daisy spinoff, Daisy Dream, now has a dozen hatchlings of its own -- Daisy Dream Kiss, Daisy Dream Forever, Daisy Dream Blush, Daisy Dream Twinkle (is this different from Daisy Twinkle???? We may never know!!!!). And this is only the tip of the Marc Jacobs flanker iceberg -- it’s perfumed turtles all the way down. In just ten years, the house has put out 83 perfumes. EIGHTY-THREE. Chanel, for reference, took a whole decade just to launch one new scent. And this is why the Haus of MJ amuses me so -- they are doing Paris Hilton level output (and she only has 25 perfumes out!) but in the context of a designer brand, so that people think when they swan into Sephora and spritz on Daisy Eau So Fresh Sorbet that they are engaging with something intricately crafted and not whipped up on a whim by a chemist on deadline. It’s pretty savvy, in that they throw so much stuff at the wall without ever knowing what will hit -- the time-tested Flood The Zone technique. Some of these perfumes might be incredible! I have no way of knowing because unlike Pokemon, there is no real way to catch them all. I find most of the scents in the Daisy line to be too sugary and fruity by half, and in an almost aspartame-laden way, like a Splenda-spiked-and-shaken passion tea from Starbucks. But even in the midst of all these flankers, and all the plastic flowers and crystals adorning globular bottles, the house managed to produce one ride-or-die scent that I will love forever and ever. They also managed to discontinue it. LE SIGH.
Marc Jacobs Ivy Splash was one of the first scents to ever emerge from the house, in 2006 (only the flagship perfume, Marc Jacobs For Women, preceded it, and by the way, that perfume is still really legit, if you are in the market for an upscale mom-style old-school gardenia musk). It was part of a triptych of “Autumn Splashes,” three colorful colognes in big, blocky ten ounce unisex bottles that are still notable for how large they look, like the Big Gulp of designer perfumes. The “Amber Splash” is the color of melted creamsicles, and the “Violet Splash” is a pretty pale periwinkle, like chilled lavender lemonade. The Ivy is, unsurprisingly, green. But it isn’t bright -- it’s a dusty green, like dried sage. The color of the juice immediately conjures an herb garden, which, at the time, was a somewhat bold thing to do. Colored juices are tricky sells; most shoppers prefer clear formulations, because they assume that a tinted perfume will stain their clothes (hot tip: it won’t! The color in perfumes is so diffuse that it is undetectable outside the bottle, unless you are dealing with a very dark brown sticky oud situation, in which case, no, don’t spray it on your linens). But for some people, the shade of the liquid can be the whole allure. I know that when I purchased this perfume at Saks in the middle of a heatwave, when I was first living in New York City, I did it because I was drawn to its soothing mint hue like a dopey moth. It looked to me like a tall glass of absinthe, like it could cool me down. And the wonderful thing about Ivy is, it is one of the rare fragrances that delivers on high external promises. The chilly green perfume inside the bottle is one of the most refreshing scents in the entire world.
I can barely describe it, but here, I’ll try: it’s wintergreen Altoids plus cold greek yogurt plus the tang of cardamom plus windblown prairie grasses. Hmm, that’s not quite capturing it! Here, I’ll try again: it’s a frozen granita made with rosemary and thyme, and somewhere nearby someone is grating nutmeg into a chilled silver goblet. Is that doing anything for you? I truly don’t know how to make you crave Ivy the way I crave Ivy, so I suppose it will have to suffice when I say that it is one of the rare fragrances I have re-purchased on the black market (aka Ebay sellers who hoard discontinued scents and sell them back to you for a profit LOL) and I will do so again when my bottle runs out, which will be years and years from now, because the bottles of this stuff are comically large. You can find it online in many places! Go hunting! It’s entirely what I think of when people ask me how to smell like an open window. It’s a palate cleanser for the mind.
Cire Trudon is known primarily as a candle company. Specifically, they’re known for candles so preposterously expensive you might think they surely must do something else other than be a candle. They don’t, though. They just smell very good and last a very long time and are candles. Part of the astronomical price is due to the company’s pedigree; they essentially created candle-making as an art and candles as a luxury rather than a utility. Cire Trudon has been making wax candles since the 1700s, providing light and decor to, among many others, the court of Louis the XV, where their candles stood as the same kind of status symbol that they are in Park Slope and West Village single-family homes today. That’s one of the things about luxury: Many people want to feel connected to history, drawn in one long golden thread back to a vanished past that can be summoned by means of graceful objects. Much of the exclusionary structures of old money and old names rely on the ideas of permanence as value, and precedence as virtue. What is new is corrupt, and not to be trusted. New doesn’t even always mean new, but merely known, in the way that the wealthy and entrenched circle their gilded wagons to keep out what is not already familiar. Cire Trudon’s candles are exquisite, they last forever, their scents are haunting, but they are also selling the idea that they are what is best because they have been known the longest, can brag the heaviest recognition.
For a company that wears this sort of history proudly in its ostentatious old-fashioned gold-leaf packaging, disdaining or refusing the trendy minimalism that most wildly expensive candle companies favor, one might expect their fragrances to smell like the glamour of a past era, like a fur coat a grandmother might leave in a pile on a bed at a wealthy person’s house party. So many high-end perfumes set out to remind the wearer of a very specific class of older women. Many of us get our ideas of perfume from these women, whether it’s our own grandmother or a elegant woman we pass on the street or in a department store, carrying the scent of a past era’s glamour, mink aging in mothballs.
But Cire Trudon’s fragrances, launched for the first time in 2017, smell surprisingly modern and fresh, unlike the musk-heavy scents that their candles and their brand would suggest. The most surprising of all may be Deux (II), which smells like nothing so much as the fresh produce aisle at a good grocery store. The grocery scent is so vivid that when I spray it on I can almost feel the tiny sprinklers misting the bunches of kale and spinach displayed greenly along the wall at Fairway. It’s a cooking green, a kitchen perfume. It smells like the green-bursting stands at a farmer’s market, like the clean and optimistic virtue of getting up on a Saturday morning and walking to the crest of the hill at Grand Army Plaza (substitute your own neighborhood accordingly), where the stalls of farm-fresh leafy greens overflow into the sunlight. Whatever it is that makes people get so excited about ramps, I think it smells like this. Deux summons up the gentle determination of setting up at a long scrubbed wooden counter with a bag of ingredients, perhaps some with dirt still clinging to them, and making something good and bright and nourishing out of time and your own two hands. This is the salvation that the parental scolding “eat your greens” turns into as we get older and discover that our bodies are not an entitlement but rather something we must maintain. The thick solid goodness of this green promises rewards for work, that health can be a kind of justice and a thing you can earn.
I think of greens as the opposite of gourmands, even though greens often refer or remind us of food. But if sugary scents are teenage or childish, then greens are the next maturation, the answer when we no longer are willing to accept the crash that comes after the sugar high. Deux is a grounded scent, one that digs into the earth instead of rising above it, the smell of slow-unfolding bargains, of long games, of lasting things, beauty without glamour, health without performance. When I say it smells like a kitchen, I mean a kitchen on a cool day in summer, with all the windows open, and the slow rewards of clean joyful work, smells breaking open under a fast knife and rising up from a wet clean cutting board into the summer air.
For the sake of full disclosure, I need to say up front that Ancients is made by a friend of mine, the beautiful and talented writer-perfumer-cosmetics-entrepreneur Tanwi Nandini Islam, who is one of those New York hyphenates who is so good at everything they do that it is borderline maddening. Not only did she write a crystalline novel that zooms from Brooklyn to Bangladesh, but she has created some of my favorite scents, and then she ALSO has created a growing empire surrounding her cult beauty products, which look stunning on just about everyone but more than anything celebrate and flatter women of color in a way that few other brands are doing, with such opulent glamour and care for the consumer. I remember once Tanwi told me she wanted to become “Brooklyn’s version of YSL” and that is exactly what she is manifesting -- her lipsticks feel heavy and substantial in your hand, and close with an extremely satisfying click. So anyways, this is all to say I am already a fan! But to be fair, I was a fan of Hi Wildflower before I ever met Tanwi, and I met her in the context of one of her (coveted) perfume-making workshops, when I wanted to get a feel for raw materials and I heard she was the gal in Brooklyn to know if you wanted to learn about the difference between peru balsam and mysore sandalwood. I can tell you that the custom oil I created that day was terrible (who thought it was a good idea to combine labdanum and grapefruit and anise notes? Who???) but two very good things came out of it: 1) I got to know Tanwi and 2) I purchased a bottle of Ancients, which now sits on the very center of our bureau in what can only be called the most jeweled spot, because both me and my partner wear it so often.
So let me tell you of this Ancients! Ancients smells like the very thing people ask us for the most, which is to smell of a forest floor right after it rains. I don’t know why, but I can tell you that when I have done Perfume Genies on Twitter (aka I ask people what they want to feel like and pick a scent to match) the #1 thing people ask is if there is a way they can “smell like a storm has passed through a thicket.” I suppose it might have something to do with renewal and the idea of a clean slate. I also imagine that it’s simpler than that: people just want to capture one of the best natural odors they have ever experienced in their life. Because truly, what can top the way the air smells when everything green has been washed clean, and the soil has been wetted enough to open up its pores and let out a loamy sigh? This is the smell of happiness for most people, but also the smell of deep thought, of meditation, of regeneration. And in a more morbid sense, I think our attraction to the deep forest might be because we all tilt towards death underneath, as it is the unspoken undertow that will eventually sweep us all away from the shore of our own lives. Many of us will end up cocooned inside the ground. So in that way, our craving for it is tomblike, but also womblike -- it is the thing that will hold us forever. So, maybe that’s why people want to smell like dirt. I’m still working on my unified theory.
When we talk about green scents, a lot of people think about vegetables -- cucumber, romaine lettuce, shiso. Or they think about grass, or tea leaves, or pine needles. But these are the endpoints of green, the sprouts you can see -- there is another side of green perfumery, one that is fascinated more with origins. I’m talking terra firma, the raw earth, the root systems underneath. On a technical perfumery note, the way to conjure much of that magic comes from an aromachemical called Terrasol -- or its close relative, moss naphthaleneol -- which mimics the scent of a fresh bag of potting soil. This is what makes your “Forest Floor” candle smell authentic, what makes Demeter Dirt smell like a simulacrum of a mud puddle. So many perfumes now use these chemicals, because, as I mentioned before, people cannot get enough of sylvan smells. One cult-popular perfume that leans into the sludge is Andrea Maack’s Coven, which just re-launched as an even grimier, witchier scent than it was before. But I think Ancients satisfies the dirt cravings better than anything else I have smelled, because it is dense and quiet, like a deep wood. The scent layers on top of the moss all other kinds of greenery -- fir trees, cypress, french lavender. In this way, it is a classical fougére -- a very traditional French class of perfumes that rely on herbal notes (the word comes from the root for “fern.”). Fougéres are typically masculine scents -- the most famous men’s scents in the world are part of this family, including Paco Rabanne and the dreaded Drakkar Noir -- but Ancients manages to fit the label while smelling like nothing else, and definitely nothing like a traditional cologne. It is, as advertised, exactly that which so many of you seek: a forest floor, after the rain. This is the very heart of green, where it is born. It was here before us, and it will outlive us, but for now, you can pantomime permanence, and wear it close to your heart.
I bought one of those jumbo bottles of IVY in 2006 and wasn’t allowed to bring it on a flight I was late to catch. I had to watch them trash it. I had worn it for a week and was addicted. That’s how it goes. Still just saw 10fl oz on eBay for $59 so not too bad ;-)