Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/56249
What Does Style Smell Like? Chandler Burr uncovers the scents that transcend perfume to become a signature. party and stepping down from the top step of the brownstone and a woman who was coming in put a hand on my arm and said, "What I'm looking for is a style, personality. What do you recommend?" Not all perfumes have real style. But those that I 58 BAL HARBOUR do manage to with three elements: a creative director who gives the perfumer a budget that lets him put in high-quality raw materials (the industry calls this the price per pound formula); a commission that asks for creativity, for brilliance, for something new; and talent—an artist (the perfumer) who has the vision and the ability to make it happen. Every year there are perfumes whose emphasis is not style. They can absolutely be well made (many are), but if they're pure genre works—the classic floral, the classic leather, the classic citrus eau fraîche— you're buying them for how well they do that genre. Perfumes with style and personality bend genres, push them, stake out a position. Yves Saint Laurent's Baby Doll is laughter pouring out in the spray. Hugely sweet with fruit—and a pure delight. Tom Ford's Black Orchid is extraordinary, a luxurious perfume that escapes the confines of luxury by daring to be more grand, more loud, unique; I've was the scent critic for five years, and because I give talks on scent and perfume, even more people know my face. I've gotten used to people—people I've never met—asking me very specific questions out of the blue about perfume. On one such occasion, I remember leaving a always thought the genius of Black Orchid is the use of a rum absolute, a scent that is succulent and heated and ripe as a tropical morning, that elevates it to the level of work of art. A huge personality. The extraordinary beauty of Chanel No. 18 is almost a photographic negative of the deep, opaque Black Orchid. No. 18 is pure translucence, flooded with light. In Tokyo I once saw a Japanese screen standing alone in a room, virtually no visible frame, its rice paper glowing both warm and cool. No. 18 is utterly unclassifiable. It is the smell of (for want of a concrete comparison) a sleek contemporary glass building, glinting in the sun, harboring inside it a garden of palms and discrete flowers. Pristine taste, flawless. Hermès' Terre, which is marketed to men but really is a scent every woman should own, moves stylistically directly away from No. 18's exquisite modernist minimalism into the territory of huge volume, wonderful power, yet it mirrors No. 18's purity. Wearing Terre is like wearing a titanium watch: perfect crafting, razor-sharp definition, its vetiver and bergamot conveying a pure luxury of astonishing raw materials on the skin. This perfume has an incredible presence. And Guerlain has breathtakingly reinvented the floral. Rose Barbare so transcends the genre that it feels like you've never smelled rose before (and you never have, not this way). All the flower's beauty is here, but there is also dark mystery, the scent of a warm night, deeply elegant. Dripping with style. N e w Y o r k T i m e s