THE DRY DOWN SIX: VIOLETS
Hi Dry Downers!
Welcome to a new edition of The Six, in which we each pick three perfumes around a theme. This month, since it’s finally springtime where we live, we’re bringing you everything to do with violets. Violet is a note with old-fashioned, aristocratic origins, first popular as a kind of status symbol for the wealthy upper class in the 19th century. Violet fragrances were originally made exclusively from Parma violets, via a costly extraction process that produced scents both wildly popular and available only to a privileged few (Violet was a favorite fragrance of both Queen Victoria and Napoleon). Near the end of that century, synthetic violet notes were developed, making the fragrance less expensive and more widely accessible. Perhaps because of these elitist origins, violet is a perfume note often thought as powdery or old-fashioned, and frequently associated with elderly ladies. It’s easy to dismiss it as a grandmother scent (although here at the Dry Down we’re on the record as defenders of old-lady perfumes). But violet is actually much more complex than that, powdery and sweet, yes, but earthy and green, too, especially violet leaf, which is equally popular in more contemporary perfumes. The scents we recommend this month showcase the delicacy and earthiness of violet in all kinds of ways, ranging from powdery and old-fashioned to kitchen-spicy and green, offering myriad approaches to this small, purple, sometimes-overlooked flower. - R + H
Fragile Violet, Eric Buterbagh - RS
Eric Buterbagh’s first commission—when he opened his floral design business in Los Angeles twenty years ago — was to deliver buckets and buckets of lavish flowers, every morning at dawn, to the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. This is not how most florists get their start. But Buterbagh already had a leg up, a head start, a way in: he was a denizen of the 1980s fashion world, first as a sales clerk at a pricey Rodeo Drive clothing boutique, pushing satin shoulderpads and high ruffle-collars on moneyed customers (for cultural reference, think the kind of place that refused to sell to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman; big mistake, huge). From there, he hopped over to Gianni Versace’s Beverly Hills outpost, rising in the ranks to become a top seller (with a little push from Sir Elton John, who apparently came into the Versace store one day and was so taken with Buterbagh’s bedside manner that he called up Gianni himself and urged him to bring Buterbagh over to work at the flagship in Milan). From there, Buterbagh worked in Italy and London through the early 1990s, for Versace and Valentino, surrounded by a consistent swirl of beautiful and gaudy excess. He burned out on fashion, but not on the giddy power that came with proximity to supermodels and celebrities; when he returned to Los Angeles to plot his next move, he wanted to find a way to move within those old circles but never have to heave around heavy gowns covered in paillettes again. And then it hit him: flowers. If there is one thing famous people can agree on, it’s stocking their homes with a consistent supply of fresh flowers. For you and I, plebeians as we are, a bouquet of roses and ranunculi might seem like a special treat, a luxury we only splurge for on payday or in desperate need of a pastoral pick-me-up. But for celebrities, perishable blooms are a regular and almost banal part of life; they are always around, sometimes in every single room of the house, never wilting or dying as they are refreshed weekly by an invisible hand.
Buterbagh was one of the first “celebrity florists” when he launched his business in 1999: his entire business model was catering to the rich and famous. He not only created the statement arrangements for the Four Seasons, but he became the go-to florist for pretty much every actor or rock star you can name: Gwyneth, Demi, Madonna, Sir Paul. And you know, he also did the blooms at Chanel and Vuitton fashion shows, and at coronations for the British royal family, and about a dozen other ridiculous projects that feel like they were selected at random out of a bag labeled “wealth porn.” His was not your neighborhood flower shop where you grab a bunch of pink carnations for ten bucks on your walk home from work. His business had a staff that wore headsets, that got six figure commissions, that could fly in rare blossoms from Africa overnight packed on dry ice to satisfy the rider for a pop star’s dressing room.
But he wasn’t content just to do the flowers, he ended up wanting to capture them. Flowers die. That’s what they do. Perfume is a bit more long-term. In 2015, he launched EB Florals, a perfume line that does only flower-based scents, at very high price points, with boutiques in West Hollywood and Saks Fifth Avenue. And -- surprise! -- much of his regular perfume clientele is actresses and models, the glimmery gang he has hung around with since he sold them Versace power suits.
I would like to tell you that EB Floral perfumes are overrated, that they are a transparent capitalistic effort to expand an already exclusive business with not much thought given to the scents themselves… but I can’t. The thing about this perfume line is: it’s exquisite. I wish it was not! But every scent I have inhaled from this house smells like fresh flowers crushed between your palms, that moment you stick your nose into a rosebud and want to cry because it smells like something that is already gone. Most of the scents are big, heady, heavy-hitters, almost drunken in concentration. Regal Tuberose is so dank it might make you feel sleepy, like a belladonna kiss. Celestial Jasmine smells like a woman who hasn’t showered in three days, which if you know and love indoles, you know this is jasmine’s most sacred state.
Fragile Violet is the house’s most delicate perfume, but that doesn’t mean it’s brittle. Naomi Campbell wears it, and we all know she’s no shrinking violet herself. The juice itself looks dangerous: almost indigo in the glass, like an inkwell for a vintage fountain pen. The smell is powdery and a bit bitter; it’s not sweet at all. It smells to me like the foyer of a house where someone always has fresh flowers, where they’ve never come home to the noxious smell of plants that have wrinkled and died. Impenetrable, like Rodeo Drive. Whether or not this intrigues or repels is up to you.
La Violette, Annick Goutal - HF
In 2001, Annick Goutal did a series of soliflore (“one flower,” does what it says on the box) perfumes, including rose, tubereuse, neroli, and violet. The website copy for the original version of the fragrance described it as “flavorsome like a violet candy, tender as an ancient lipstick.” Lots of violet perfumes claim to smell like violet candies, a niche old-timey scent for which I think perfumers and perfume copywriters wildly overestimate the public’s general nostalgia. Ten or twenty years ago they were something remembered their grandfathers having loved, which means at this point they may have aged out of memory entirely. Those old-fashioned violet candies do smell amazing, or at least they smell very specific. They are an oddly masculine sort of pastel scent, standing in for a kind of soft-spoken, perfectly dressed, exquisitely mannered, elderly man.
Even this imaginary grandfather is an extremely classist fantasy; violet as a perfume note has always had to do with the sort of money that is as understated as it is heavy-handed. A favorite scent of Queen Victoria, became popular during her reign due in part to how expensive it was -- extracted at the time from Parma violets by a painstaking and costly process, it was a scent that granted status, confirming its wearer as wealthy. There was a time when violet smelled like money, and its association with a particular kind of old person and the candies they might carry still has something to do with this longing for the comforts of money old enough to extend back into two previous centuries.
To my nose, though, neither the older formulation of La Violette, nor the newer one (which I like far less) smells like violet candies. The second part of the description is much more interesting, and more accurate to it, though. “An ancient lipstick” doesn’t sound… great. It sounds kind of gross, maybe, in that Miss Havisham way I’ve written about here before, to which so many floral perfumes inevitably return. If an ancient lipstick carries glamour and nostalgia and sentimentality, it also carries a heavy does of decay, the long unused past, a sort of music-box and mothballs smell. The original version of this scent was created in memory of Goutal’s mother, and it smells like a kindly ghost. It is watery and very light, but surprisingly long-lasting, winking in and out of presence, like a memory that refuses to fade. Violets are often the smell of sadness, of something lost, the last whiff of an old-faded perfume on a dress that’s been unworn since a previous century, its memories of old-fashioned parties almost forgotten.
Reviews of La Violette often talk about the green notes hidden in what seems like an old-lady floral, and that rainy, delicately-earthy edge is what stands out to me about this scent. It is also the heart of the memory it summons. A few years ago, my husband I found ourselves in a high-end department store in a city where neither of us live, in a neighborhood we would never otherwise have visited, at the end of a long vacation, killing an hour before meeting some friends at a nearby restaurant. To pass the time, we went into the kind of store I used to call “a scary wife store,” a famously-named cruise-ship of a place, where expensive brands have their own named alcoves with dedicated recessed lighting and the actual clothes seem to forever recede from your grubby fingers. If you can steel yourself for the chilly, not-for-you museum-of-capitalism experience of these stores, they do tend to have really great perfume departments, and Annick Goutal is often a fixture in these. It was the end of the day, an awkward in-between hour. Our feet hurt and we were tired and cranky and I can’t explain why this particular perfume was suddenly transportative, why it fixed our mood, why it not only smelled like hotel sheets, but felt like them. We both sprayed our wrists with it, and smelled equally like better versions of ourselves. It was like putting a filter on photograph. I can’t explain it, but I also I believe “I can’t explain it” should be the sentence at the center of any really good experience of perfume, and it’s the thing I’m always chasing with scents -- I want my experience of the scent to happen to me, to evade my simple comprehension.
What La Violette smells like to me is the late afternoon and evening that followed, when we went outside and it rained and we got caught in the downpour in among long slanting rows of white London houses punctuated by sumptuous green private gardens, and how after the rain the late August sunset seemed to last for hours, and how we had fancy pizza and cheap wine with my oldest friend and her wife, how it was the night they told us they were engaged, how this friend and I had seen each other through so many storms, and now, on this one soft drenched night at the end of summer, all our lives were flourishing.
The reformulation is no longer a soliflore, and has added a bunch of rose that makes the perfume infinitely more boring and more obvious, more like a zillion other easy-to-wear and inoffensive florals. But for me, the memory of that one night is still there, under it, in the pure violet notes, watery and kind and sexy, like the hour after rain and the end of the summer and the rare day when everything works and the edges meet, exhaling slow into evening.
Violetta de Parma, Borsari - RS
I try not to write about fragrances here that are borderline ungettable, because perfume that you cannot smell may as well not exist. But part of loving scent is the thrill of the hunt; the truffle pig scavenging of it all. And you cannot talk about the history of violet perfumes without Borsari, so I figured, this is one for you to track down. It appears often on EBay, and sometimes on Amazon (legend has even heard tell of it appearing in TJ Maxx!), so if you have the will, there is a way. The bottle you really want to find is the original, which dates all the way back to 1870, but if course if that exists anywhere it is probably in a crypt. So do what you can.
Even the original fragrance that Ludovico Borsari whipped up in his small Italian fragrance shop in the late 19th century is a copy, a facsimile of a perfume that, as the lore has it, a group of Italian monks developed for Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, sometime in the 1820s. Back in the Napoleonic era, monks were apparently taking on all kinds of aesthetic side projects: making beer, weaving fine textiles, mixing up bespoke fragrances. In between the flagellating and the rosary bead counting, there was, it seems, a lot of time for crafting.
Marie Louise, poor Marie Louise, with her doughy Hapsburg features, who, like Marie Antoinette before her, was the daughter of Austrian monarchs sold off to France as a way to barter peace. Her life ended a little better than Marie Antoinette’s, in that she didn’t have her head sliced off, but she also died young. Marie Louise did not live to see 34. Her marriage to Napoleon was...up and down. As far as we know, she grew to like him, or claimed she did, and they were married right up until his death. But: he was still in love with his first wife. Napoleon and Josephine had divorced, and Marie Louise was brought in as pinch hitter with a uterus, a womb called off the bench to try to produce an heir. But Napoleon and Josephine never really split up, not emotionally. Theirs was a co-dependent, fucked up, crazy, stupid obsessive love right up until Josephine died, when Napoleon was so distraught he basically went catatonic. He kept seeing Josephine on the side, the entire time he was married to Marie Louise, and though he told many of his friends that his young new wife was totally suitable for breeding (and they did have a son together), he could never really connect with her the way he did with Josephine, who by all accounts was an extremely hot, charismatic charmer who was down for it in the bedroom all the time. I mean, try competing with that.
Marie Louise spent much of her young days in her chambers, pretending everything was fine. She wrote handwritten notes in violet ink, the color of her favorite flower. She liked nice things, and for a time she could have them. She wore ice blue gowns and red velvet capes. She made it work. This all ended when Napoleon went into exile and she did not join him -- her family forbade it. This is when she really fell in love for the first time. She fell for Count Neippberg, the Austrian man that her family had hired to restrain her and prevent her from going to Elba (classic Stockholm syndrome!). Though she and Nap never divorced officially, they stopped speaking forever.
As a kind of door prize for all those years of putting up with France, the Congress of Vienna gave Marie Louise the title of Duchess of Parma, and she got to move down to sunny Italy, where she walked barefoot through fields of Parma violets and had the happiest time of her life. She loved Neippberg, and he loved her, in the way she felt she deserved. She was at last, free of Napoleon and all his drama. She had another child, one she felt close to (her first son was loyal to his dad, always resented her, and was a dismissive dick towards her generally until he died of tuberculosis). While she lived in Parma, the local monks made her a purple perfume, and it must have smelled like joy.
Neippberg died first, devastating ML, though she soldiered on and remarried. Then, a few years later, she caught a bad cold and never woke up. The world was not so kind to Marie Louise. But this perfume, if you can find it, smells like breaking free. It smells like comfort and the Italian countryside and feeling the sun on your face after a long, cold winter.
Aoud Violet, Mancera - HF
You know who loves perfume? Bros. If an actually-good version of Smell-O-Vision suddenly existed and one had to decide which movies cried out for it most, a reasonable list would put The Wolf of Wall Street right at the top, before pretty much any romance, or anything that you might sooner think of as smelling like roses. Who actually smells like roses is bros, finance dudes, the money guys in start-ups, and the freshman class at Wharton. Bros are among the most robust and reliable customers at high-end perfume retailers and among the most willing, as a category of people, to try something risky with their scent profile. Bros love a big floral bouquet of a perfume.
The flamboyance of a certain strain of masculinity is its a type of drag, by virtue simply of its bigness, its over-the-top affect, the level of performance it requires, demands, and enables. To be very much any one thing, especially when it comes to gender presentation, is always to be wearing a costume, getting on stage, performing. Bro-drag is of course lower stakes, since extreme masculinity is in general rewarded, centered, and showered with praise - nothing about this kind of performance, at least when a cis straight man does it, dressing up in an outlandish costume of himself, is dangerous, but its flamboyance is never the less so large as to have a sort of princess-y quality, flouncing around, being the prettiest, being the most extra. Which is to say: There is something very floral about bros, which is perhaps why so many of them love florals, and why there are surprisingly many florals made for them. A lot of things are toxic and horrible about straight masculinity and bro-culture, and its flamboyance is much better, less tinged with a sickness in the back of the throat, when borrowed by someone who is not traditionally welcomed inside it. It is best observed from a distance, or replicated in satire. But there is something about it that appeals when it is loudest, most princess-y, most floral, simply because it is so gloriously at odds with itself.
A staple of the bro’s power wardrobe is the color pink. Even more than the requisite blue gingham check shirt, the pink button down is what summons up for me immediately the heavy-shouldered warm of the first after-work hour in the financial district in New York or London. Thinking of bro scents, most people cursorily think of woods, ouds, leathers, or punishingly fresh colognes as “masculine,” but when I think of florals, I think of bros, and of pink shirts. A certain kind of big, brassy, fussy floral always feels first of all like a bro perfume to me, because it’s a pink shirt. Besides, the two scent profiles (broad-shoulder oud/musk/leather; fussy princess floral) are rarely exclusive of one another anymore, as evidenced by Mancera’s gestural, braying, musky violet. Mancera’s Oud Violet is the pink button-down of fragrances. It swaggers its powdery floral into the middle of patchouli and oud, landing on musk and vetiver in the dry down, where a ghost violet lingers. It opens with a peppery spice accord, but rushes to get to the flowers. It’s beautiful, but it also smells like Elizabeth Holmes’ business-voice sounds. It’s very big, and very silly, and a guilty pleasure, and I love it. It’s a little embarrassing, but sometimes being embarrassing on purpose is a power move, which is an embarrassing phrase, and the right one to describe this fragrance.
Violette, Molinard - RS
The perfume house Molinard has been around forever. We are talking 1849, in Grasse, France, the bucolic town that most perfumers consider to be the white-hot center of the French perfume industry, and therefore the birthplace of most fine fragrances that exist today. Grasse is the city that invented enfleurage, the process for boiling flowers in fat so that they release their essence. This makes sense, as the other major industry in Grasse was the leather business, and the tanneries had a lot of extra animal tallow lying around (the tanneries also smelled terrible, as you might imagine, and a lot of the perfume houses that popped up in Grasse grew out of the need to scent leather gloves and bags with fragrances that could mask the aroma of death that clung to them). Molinard is so old, so OG, that it is one of the houses that perfume pilgrims who travel through Grasse always visit for a walk-through tour, as a way to observe ancient methods of harvesting and squeezing the life out of flowers still in use today.
In 2015, the house re-issued its iconic fragrances in purple bottles, perhaps as a way to help them stand out on counters. The result is striking, but it really only works for Violette. The Vanilla and Orange Blossom scents just don’t have the same appeal in opaque orchid. Some people consider this scent to be the ur-violet, the standout example of the genre. It does smell like all the things you tend to want from violet scent: chalky powdery candy, soapy aldehydes, the “pastille” quality that people always say they want in a perfume despite the fact that they haven’t eaten a pastille in years. It’s got all of that, plus a musky undergirding that acts as an engine for the more subdued notes, plumping them like a volumizing mascara.
There’s a feeling, with Molinard perfumes, of returning to the roots of something. They come from the place where modern perfumery was born out of necessity, where the world’s best chemists go to study perfume-making, where pure floral essences drip out of vaporized stills. There is a simplicity and conciseness to their perfumes, like they are the solid, reliable base layer of a pyramid. There’s nothing volatile about Violette, which is why I like it. It’s a violet you can count on.
Violaceum, L’Artisan Parfumeur - HF
Perfumes, like people, usually get their own appeal wrong. Just about the hardest thing to comprehend about yourself is why people like or love you. The things we think we understand as our beguiling qualities are generally the things the people we know find grating and the people we love grudgingly tolerate, while the things that embarrass us about ourselves and that we seek to hide are generally the things that make us endearing and lovable.
Perfumes, too, frequently misunderstand their own appeal, although it’s usually hard to know whether the disconnect happens at the level of the copywriter, the perfumer, or somewhere in between. But nevertheless, what a new scent advertises, the reasons it berates you to love it, is rarely the thing it does well, the reason it is actually worth loving.
L’Artisan’s Violaceum (why do perfumes have to give themselves impossible-to-spell names, is it because they are specifically trying to ruin my specific life specifically), part of their new-ish Natura Fabulis line, wants you to know that it’s not a normal violet, it’s a cool violet. It’s the violet perfume version of the nice well-adjusted straight-A kid who just desperately wants to be a goth. All the other listed notes around violet are weird, and sound discordant - carrot, saffron, leather. It is a floral that trying to convince you it is anything but a floral, a weird scent, funky and food-ish and dark.
Except it really isn’t - the carrot and saffron notes fade almost immediately, and although the leather sticks around, it’s a soft, gentle, familiar leather, a comforting worn-in armchair in a library. What this scent actually is is an exquisitely rendered old-fashioned violet, drenched in iris, a classic, beautifully cold floral pairing - both are light purple and smell delicately like sadness, like the soft, hollow feeling after a hot shower or a good cry, and iris makes violet smell more like itself, acting as a highlighter. If you want an absolutely classic version of violet, one that might make you feel transported back to the delicate upper-crust balls of the 19th century, with everyone doused in Parma violets, this might be your perfume. It is a wonderfully simple, comprehensible floral, and just an extremely violet violet. Unlike so many others that say they do, this fragrance actually smells like violet candies. It will make you miss a grandfather you likely never had. It is springtime, and good manners, and pastel dresses, and small, clean, cut flowers, powdery and beautiful.