The Dry Down Six: Tropicals
Hi Dry Downers!
Welcome to a new edition of The Six, in which we each pick three perfumes around a theme. This month, we are leaning into summer energy with a letter about tropical scents, perfumes that evoke night-blooming florals and the nocturnal mammals that love them, fragrances that smell like slushy blue cocktails with a tiny umbrella teetering on the rim. Tropical notes — coconut, banana, tiare, grapefruit, guava, frangipani, pineapple — tend to be heady and boozy and rich, which is why they work best in the summer, when the heat shimmers off your body and carries the sweet fumes with it. Tropicals are different than aquatic scents — those scents that smell both like the ocean or like the sunblock that you wear on the beach — this is an attempt to smell less like the sea, and more like a Seabreeze. Tropicals are meant to stir memories — of vacations past, of places you’ve never been, of childhood and sticky Sno-cone fingers. Go ahead, go coconuts. xox R and H
Jangala, Pierre Guillaume - HF
Generally, coconut is an all-or-nothing proposition: You either love it or you hate it. I happen to be one of those people who loves it. I have for whatever reason been an obsessive fan of coconut since I can remember, since I was a small child. I can't keep shredded coconut, the stuff meant to be used in baking, in my home because I will inevitably eat all of it, from the bag, by the greedy handful, within a week. I even like coconut syrup in coffee drinks, a vile and actively disgusting ingredient that no one should like and which I would happily drink by itself over ice. Very frequently, when I love a perfume (this is true, for instance, of Carnal Flower), coconut turns up in the list of notes upon closer examination, the same old reason, the same ground-in preference, a sticky-sweet child's palette.
But nothing, not one thing, smells more like summer than coconut. It may be a flavor a child would love, but it is the childish things we never grow out of, the part of us that keeps waiting for someone to tell us that school is out for summer long past when we have been in school or when summer is really meaningfully different from any other part of the year. Coconut is the smell of getting away with something. It is a cool breeze on a hot day, the idea of what candy is supposed to taste like when you want candy but before you get it.
I wasn’t ready for summer this year; I keep trying to ignore or evade it, turning away from windows, wearing long sleeves. But the part of summer I can deal with, the part that I am ready for, happens early in the morning, before everyone is awake. Thomas gets up and makes coffee at 5:30am and convinces me to get up and have some. Then he goes back to bed and I sit by the window and wake up slowly. At this hour it isn’t quite bright yet, and although it’s already hot out, the full, abrasive humidity hasn’t yet arrived. It’s often still grey and cloudy, and all the summer greens down below the window light up against the pale sky. Everything is quiet for an hour or so, lush and undemanding.
This isn’t a summer experience one would naturally associate with a coconut fragrance, most of which have a sticky-sunscreen, candy-bright, sex-on-the-beach sort of vibe, the neon fuschia bikini of perfume notes. But Jangala is a subtle, early-morning coconut, maybe a…meditative coconut? That sounds silly, which is about right -- all coconut is silly, and it is even silly for a coconut fragrance to not smell silly at all, to smell woody and green and cool like the early morning.
Jangala, from noted perfume hottie Pierre Guillaume’s 2015 Collection Croisiere, is meant to smell like a jungle, which in actuality means that it crosses a lot of woods and greens with a tropical coconut bomb, a combination that, when I think about it, I’d assume might be much more common than it is. In nature, big fruity tropical plants dwell alongside earthy woods and greens all the time. But a lot of what can put people off of fruity scents is the assumption that these fragrances must be plastic-y and unnatural, divorced from their very real context of cool green leaves and clinging, hearty dirt.
Jangala instead makes that earthy-green context the frame for its beachy coconut note, which produces a perfume that slowly introduces the wearer to summer, that shepherds them into its sticky-sweet exclamations as gently as a long waking-up through a grey early morning. The opening is all greens against grey sky, eucalyptus and rosewood balancing warm and cool. Once that’s lulled you into thinking that this is a cool-edged woody scent, the coconut note arrives, much like how the heat suddenly takes over the morning around 8am, trumpeting summer down through a June day. But by the time it’s arrived, you’re ready for it. It is sweet without being sticky or cloying, the addictive juiciness of coconut in a way that is somehow not at all amateurish or greedy. There is so much summer left. We have only just begun. We have time to enjoy it, to remember why we liked summer in the first place, its early light and easy flirtations.
Coqui Coqui is -- and stick with me here because this is a ride -- not really a perfume brand, or rather, it is absolutely a perfume brand, but it is also a line of insanely expensive luxury resorts on the Yucatan Peninsula (and soon, on the island of Bora Bora) founded by a six foot two Argentinian male model named Nicolas Malleville who used to front campaigns for Gucci and Burberry and Tod’s (one better known Burberry ad featured him in an unbuttoned Oxford, with Kate Moss gently fondling his pectorals). His mini hospitality empire -- still with me? -- includes a few opulent hotels dotted throughout southern Mexico (the part that juts out into the Caribbean near Belize, where the Mayans built their temples, where the province called Quintana Roo inspired the name of Joan Didion’s late daughter), the sorts of places where models and actresses (the kind who knew Malleville in his previous life) go to “unplug” and yet somehow obsessively document on Instagram. His properties are not so much glassy high-rise affairs or all-inclusive day drinking resorts as they are repurposed vintage properties converted into auberges. His Merida property, for example, is a 19th century villa built by “sisal barons” in the Parisian style (his words, not mine), gussied up with clawfoot marble bathtubs and mustard velvet chesterfield sofas and miniature infinity pools with Moroccan tilework. These are the sort of finely manicured but still “rustic” places that truly wealthy people like to rent on vacation, because they feel like they are experiencing an unsung, raw gem while every single amenity they could ever want is still there before they even have to ask for it. Coqui hotels have full martini bars inside antique medicine cabinets, or a humble rope hammocks hanging under crystal chandeliers, that kind of thing.
Each hotel in the Coqui Coqui constellation has its own scent, but the line has expanded beyond that to include over twenty individual fragrances, which began popping up in other locations -- at least in New York boutiques -- in the early 2010s. Most people who encounter these scents (they are in Bergdorf Goodman, Oak, Net-A-Porter, Barneys and Fred Segal in Japan, Galleries Lafayette in Paris) likely don’t even know they are attached to a hotel chain; the hotels are far too exclusive and inaccessible to have seeped into global consciousness, at least outside of the gilded crust of travelers who buy Town and Country magazine unironically and don’t realize that the publication is a secretly camp document preparing us for the class war. Instead, the perfume has become a cult hit in spite of, and not because of, its hospitality connections. This is not always the case -- a lot of hotels have in-house “olfactive signatures” that lend themselves to products a person can buy to feel like they have never checked out. You can often spot the infamous candles that smell like the Hotel Costes in Paris in the background in Into the Gloss photo shoots. The Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan has its own Le Labo scent, Cade 26. The Ritz-Carlton has a line of room sprays, The W has a $50 fig candle, and Le Sirenuse on the Amalfi coast has a perfume collaboration with Eau d’Italie. These days, an essential part of opening a luxury hotel is hiring a company like Aroma 360, which makes proprietary lobby scentscapes that hoteliers can then bottle and sell for a 200% markup in the gift shop. There is nothing people love more than trying to recreate the hotel experience at home; you can never really do it, just like your hair will never look as good as when a stylist blows it out, but that just makes the pursuit all the more compulsive.
And yet, Coqui Coqui perfumes don’t really have the sheen of “this is a very fancy version of the hotel shower gel” on them. This may be because the Coqui residencias are so teeny and remote (one is in a Mayan village in the middle of the rainforest, where a palapa suite costs about a thousand dollars a night), but it could also be because Malleville seems to want to have a legitimate fragrance house outside of the hotel brand. He’s sent his scents into department stores all over the world, allowing them to take on context outside of marble bathtubs that few of us will ever see. When I encountered Coco Coco for the first time, it was in a clothing store in Williamsburg, where the clerk simply told me that it was the most divine tropical coconut scent she had found. And really, it is that. There is a reason it keeps selling out everywhere online -- finding it in stock is sort of like playing whack-a-mole. The scent captures a young coconut, when it isn’t yet cloying or sticky or sweet, when the meat is the palest green, crunchy as a celery stalk. This is not a wearable boat drink, nor is it suntan lotion-esque. It’s a vegetal fruit with the dew still on it, almost bitter. Most of us will never visit a Coqui Coqui resort, but you don’t need to try to capture whatever that is to enjoy what this is, which smells the way you feel the first time you go into a greenhouse at the zoo: hugged by humidity, with the slight tang of chlorine in the air, hoping to see something colorful slithering nearby.
I have never been to Hawaii, which is maybe why I am the perfect person to tell you about Hanalei, a perfume named for what creator Tanaïs calls “the stunning paradise town” on the edge of Kauai’s coast, a place “soul-stirring, lush, brimming with scents and cosmic energy.”
I have not been to this town, or to anywhere in Hawaii at all, so I cannot tell you if the scent smells accurate to my experience of the place. But I don’t need to. What Hanalei creates so perfectly is the idea of a place like this, of an island paradise, better and brighter, juicier and sexier, than any place could ever be in reality, in lived, flat-footed experience.
Not always, but often, the best part of vacation is the planning. Anticipating a vacation is a salivating activity; the shimmering image of the place to which one is escaping, of the days away from emails, of un-obligated hours and an unfamiliar bed and a few days or even weeks free from routine, ripen and blossom and purr in the imagination. Vacations themselves can be wonderful, but when they are as good as what one imagined, it is not because they lived up to that imagining but because they deviated from it enough not to have to compete with it. It is impossible for a vacation to measure up to the imagining of that vacation; they are two are parallel lines, equal to each other and unable ever to meet.
Hanalei smells like the idea of a vacation, like the way an island paradise looks and smells and feels when envisioned on the coldest, slushiest, shittiest day of winter. It smells like the fantasy of a week off from work that jumps unbidden into the mind on the worst, most unfair, most overloaded Tuesday, the way a vacation looks when one furiously imagines it in order to get through a weekday of conflicting meetings and irritable colleagues and impossible asks and things that aren’t my job, actually, but I guess someone has to do them. When one’s mind escapes to the exact opposite of the office’s grind and burnout, the exact opposite of the city’s damp grey claustrophobia, the place where it goes smells like this perfume.
“Sexy” is in general a subjective term. What is sexy to one person is often inscrutable from the outside, and nearly impossible to explain, having to do with each of our personal and inward tangles of memory and association, triggers and rejections and almosts. But look, this is just a sexy fragrance. It is just about the closest thing to an objective idea of sexy that exists in smell. It layers pink peppercorn and grapefruit and rosewood in the opening, cutting the citrus with woods so that the brightness never goes sharp, and then melts into indulgent, languid ylang-ylang and moroccan rose and huge, animalic jasmine sambac. It dries down from there into bourbon vanilla, Royal Hawaiian sandalwood, and peru balsam, woody and warm and loving. The sweetness is countered with complexity, the brightness with warmth. It smells like being half-dressed and half-drunk all day on a day when you have nothing you are supposed to do except be half-dressed and half-drunk all day. Also maybe you’re on a beach. And you look great. It is the idea of the summer everyone else is having, and the sex everyone else is having, which is to say the best possible version of both.
The 70-year-old Parisian fashion designer Claude Montana is still alive, though his is currently a retrospective existence. He lives in an apartment in the Palais Royal in the 1st arrondissement, and apparently wanders around the streets of his neighborhood unrecognized, despite his tectonic contributions to 1980s fashion. As a new short documentary that just came out about his life shows, Montana is still a designers designer, a favorite of Marc Jacobs and Gareth Pugh (who helped design a capsule collection re-introducing some of Montana’s most iconic styles earlier this year, in collaboration with the avant-garde vintage shopping site Byronesque). Claude Montana did not just use shoulderpads, he was shoulderpads. He was not the first eighties designer to exaggerate the deltoids, but he was definitely the most extra at it, cinching the waist past logic or chiropractics, and blowing out the shoulders until a person’s torso looked like an upside-down triangle. It wasn’t a real Montana moment if a person did not look a little bit like they were wearing a milkmaid’s yoke under their jacket. When you think of eighties blazers, with their marshmallowy breadth and unsubtle embellishments, like huge gold buttons or fringe or ruffles, you may not know it but you are honoring Claude Montana’s vision. He loved excess and gaudiness and a skintight leather bustier.
What is funniest to me about the bottle for Just Me, his perfume from 1998 (that I have a miniature of, part of a lot of minis I bought on impulse from Ebay a few years back), is that it looks like an ideal Montana silhouette. It has wide trapezoidal shoulders, and then a glass zipper opening down the front — and this was ten years after those proportions were in style. He was just so committed to the shape! There really is nothing stylish about Just Me, especially not now, and that’s why I like it so much. For one thing, its main note is pineapple. Here is something to know: pineapple, except in the rarest of cases, does not belong anywhere near perfumery. There is no natural way to isolate it, and so what you tend to get is syrupy and lab-made, more of a melted Jolly Rancher mess than a delicate tropical essence blowing on the breeze. The minute a chemist adds pineapple to a composition, it immediately risks becoming trashy and tween, the fragrance equivalent of getting your ears pierced at Claire’s. Only a few perfumers have ever managed to pull it off -- Ananas Fizz from L’Artisan comes to mind, or Hilde Soliani’s experimental Sipario which perfectly evokes a pina colada and is sold out everywhere forever. Montana’s Just Me falls on the right side of tasteful, which is strange, as so many of his clothes do not. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an easy scent to wear. It’s maximalist, full of well, everything: pineapple, chocolate (yes, chocolate, and you can really smell it here), jasmine, melon, white musk, honey, ginger. The closest real-world equivalent I can think of are those chocolate-dipped fruit Ring Jell candies, and even then this scent is far wilder than those taste. It’s sickeningly sweet to start, and then matures into something spicier with an alcoholic kick. In essence, this scent is a tiki drink at a hipster bar that goes down so easily that danger lies ahead. Two spritzes and you’re dancing.
Sabba Bianca, Profumum Roma - HF
Look, it’s summer, and sometimes you want to be ridiculous. Tropical scents mean fruity scents, but they also mean the absolute over-the-top self-parodic seductions of totally concentrated and super-intense white florals. These are, embarrassingly enough, often my favorite perfumes, but if this is embarrassing, it is embarrassing in the same way it is embarrassing to actually love summer, or to buy a very sexy outfit and wear it because you want to look sexy, because you already know you look good. Doing anything with absolute sincerity and total self-awareness, shedding the avoidant deflections of not knowing, of not noticing, of accident and irony, is embarrassing, but it is also delicious. (The word delicious itself is a good example of this kind of embarrassing).
Anyway, Sabba Bianca is a huge, embarrassing, concentrated white floral that lasts all day and that I would recommend applying very sparingly and maybe not if you’re going to be in a small enclosed space for a lot of hours. It is an unblinking seduction, a whole over-the-top lingerie set with the garter belt and the stockings and the high heels worn indoors. It is a white crocheted bikini on the beach in summer and being an adult in 2019 who still sometimes wants to look like the girl in a James Bond movie from the 1960s. It absolutely drips with tuberose and ylang-ylang and tiare, with a slight whispering undercurrent of violet. That’s it, that’s all the notes. It is ridiculous. It is the scene in the movie where a very attractive person walks across the street on a hot summer day and traffic literally stops. It melts and drips and it is hot out and everywhere everyone is emerging from offices and from homes, from winter coats and boats and jeans, turning from schedules to skin. Everyone is giving up into their own body, sliding languid across the sweatstain of the day. This perfume smells like the haze at the edge of the view on a hot day, and it smells like an afternoon so humid that all the secret, flower-heavy gardens hidden within apartment complexes betray their locations to the street, wafting out into the view like some kind of parade.
It is easy to feel separate from summer, overwhelmed or confused by it, standing apart from its heady delights and demands. But this is a perfume that knows it belongs in summer, that lies down on the grass in the park in a white linen dress and somehow stands up free of wrinkles or grass-stains. For even just a few days every year, maybe we should each throw ourselves into such silly self-seriousness, doing the entire thing, not winking at it or apologizing for it. This is a perfume for a summer day that means it.
Pacifica, Hawaiian Ruby Guava - RS
Pacifica is an odd line in that it is kind of everywhere, or at least it was in my mid-size city when I was growing up, in boho clothing boutiques and natural foods stores. I still spot the line around New York, in little indie pharmacies or near the register at fancy bodegas; somehow this Portland brand has managed to become just the right amount of ubiquitous. It’s not Dove or Olay, but it also elicits an “oh yeah, I’ve seen that before” kind of recognition. In any case, they are a gem hiding in plain sight; they make some really legit fragrances, especially for the price point (a little bottle runs around $25). Growing up, I wore French Lilac, which is exactly as good as a starter powdery floral scent for a sophomore in high school should be.
The real star of the line, though, is the Ruby Guava, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It smells like guavas, the small subtropical fruit (mostly cultivated in India and South America and Florida) that have acid green peels and tongue-pink insides (though some can have white or peach flesh). It is hard to describe the scent of guava, because it smells like nothing else on earth, but if I were to try, I’d say it smells the way you hope pink lemonade will taste before the chemical tang inevitably lets you down. It’s like ruby red grapefruit meets creamy passion fruit meets something floral, a faint waft of tuberose. It smells like fruit that has definitely been fertilized by insects, the kind of juicy, sensual pulp that gets wasps horny and all worked up. When I hear the term “nectar of the gods,” I always think that the phrase has to be referring to guava nectar. Nothing else is so naturally, giddily ambrosial. Sometimes I wonder if guavas came from another planet; their sublimity is probably more than we deserve.
It may seem strange that more perfumers don’t try to capture the scent, if it is so seraphic, but it also makes sense. For one thing, you can’t distill pulpy fruits too well. There is guava peel essential oil, but that doesn’t quite get you where you need to go. So the task is to chemically recreate it, and like most chemical renderings of fruit, the result is closer to a flavoring than a fine perfume, a popsicle color rather than an opera for the senses. Also: guava is so specific, and so particular, that when you wear it people will certainly know, and a lot of people don’t want to be so transparent with their tropical vibes. Wearing guava is like pouring the slurry liquid from a fruit cup all over your body; it may not be a bad decision, but it is certainly one you can’t take back.
But, on a few days each summer, Hawaiian Ruby Guava will be exactly what you want. It is a perfume for those days when you don’t have to do anything but bask; where your only plans for the day are to become the human fruit platter, laying out in the sun, looking appetizing and ripe. Guava is a scent you wear to seduce yourself, to remember your own impossibility. There is only one thing in the world that smells like guava, and there is also only one of you.