Christopher Stocks

Perfume

Sauvage cut

May 26th, 2011

What have Dior done to Eau Sauvage Extrême? I started buying it when it was pretty much what it said on the bottle – a slightly more intense and much longer-lasting version of the original Eau Sauvage, with the original’s knockout sherbert lemon and jasmine combination cranked up several extra degrees. Not something you’d want to splash around too liberally, but fun on a dreary day.

Eau Sauvage is a scent I love, not just for its superb intrinsic quality but also for its history as the first modern men’s fragrance to have a strongly floral character, cleverly disguised by the herbal and citrus elements of a classic cologne. It was also one of the first perfumes I ever wore, so there’s an element of nostalgia to my affection too.

So when the last bottle ran out it seemed only natural to buy another – except that when I next sprayed some on it was blatantly obvious that there was something missing: namely a huge hole where the lemony part of the formula should have been. Yes, Dior (or rather Firmenich or whichever fragrance company makes the scent for them) has taken the original and reformulated it, in one of those secretive, below-the-belt moves that give the industry such a bad name.

These kinds of underhand tricks go on all the time, but it’s particularly annoying when it happens to an iconic fragrance – and particularly stupid when what’s been taken out is the citrus element that makes Eau Sauvage such a distinctive perfume in the first place; without it it’s a muted, muffled thing, with about as much appeal as a piece of damp felt.

I’ve learned my lesson, but Dior obviously haven’t learned theirs.

Picture goes here?

April 13th, 2011

Writing about perfume is all very well, but who wants to read a blog that has no pictures? Maybe I’m just a lazy git – correction: I am a lazy git – but it’s so hard to find good images to illustrate my perfume postings that it puts me off (or at least gives me an easy excuse to avoid) writing them, when I should really be adding new posts every time I smell a new scent.

Or perhaps I’m just not being imaginative enough? That’s perfectly possible, but it also raises an interesting point, which is what an iron grip the perfume licensees have over the way their products are pictured and advertised.

Like wine or music, perfume doesn’t, in itself, have much (if any) innate visual appeal, and perfume bottles, though far more varied in design than bottles of wine, are often so hideous to contemplate that it’s kinder not to illustrate them at all. Take the unutterably hideous Womanity from Thierry Mugler, for example… (NB I mean ‘take’ in a physical rather than a metaphorical sense – as in please, please take it a very long way away and never bring it back.)

 

What a stink

March 7th, 2011

There’s nothing unusual about hating airports, but it only dawned on me last week at Gatwick how much I hate airport duty free shops too. I always feel I should have a look at the hundreds of perfumes on offer in case I stumble across something wonderful and new, but while it’s useful, I guess, to keep an eye on the latest big launches (though who can keep up with them all?), I always stumble out afterwards feeling slightly depressed and very headachy.

My problem? It’s that in all those hundreds of perfumes there are maybe three or four I’d want to buy another time, and they’re nearly always the ones I know and like already. Of all the hundreds of new launches every year, in other words, barely one or two are worth a second sniff, and most of them are (not to mince words) utterly vile.

There are occasional exceptions, but they’re pretty rare, and often unexpected: Paco Rabanne Black XS for Men, for example, which is ridiculously sweet but enjoyably silly and smells of strawberries (though it’s based on a variation on orange); or Marc Jacobs Bang – hideous advertising, hideous bottle, but actually not such a bad scent inside. But mostly it’s sniff and recoil in horror: why does anyone buy this stuff? Just because they’re told to? It doesn’t seem to make sense.

There again, maybe it was always this way: apart from sad exceptions it’s the good, on the whole, that tends to survive, while the rubbish and the dreadful is quietly dropped and disappears. And perhaps it was just the same in the 1920s or the 1950s. The difference, today, is that there are far too many launches, the industry having backed itself into an unprofitable corner where only the latest thing sells, but only because it’s the latest thing – and it’s all too quickly superceded.

Booked

October 4th, 2010

It’s turned out to be hard to keep much other work going while working on the next book (the forests book, that is), and as for earning a living – well, they say that writing books is no way to make money and boy were they right. It’s a good way to stop making money, for sure: my income’s gone steadily down ever since I started writing Forgotten Fruits, and it’s now pretty much reached zero.

But in the meantime the (very) occasional thing comes along, and one of these, thanks to Nathalie Grainger and the inimitable Roja Dove, was being invited to write a chapter for Quintessentially Perfume, a new book on perfume and the perfume industry. Next up: how about a weekly perfume column? I’m waiting for your call…

The perfume industry: welcome to 1972

November 3rd, 2009

If there’s one thing I’m totally passionate about it’s perfume – more than poetry, more than parsnips, more than peristyles or pain-au-chocolat. I find perfume, and the multi-billion dollar perfume industry, absolutely fascinating, and I’d love to write more about it, especially as there are so few good perfume journalists out there.

Why this should be is a bit of a mystery, but it means that for most people the subject of perfume continues to be surrounded by as much mystification and snobbery as the subject of, say, wine was a good twenty years ago.

Today, largely thanks to two decades of excellent wine journalism, we know more about wine than we ever did before, and that’s reflected not just in our confidence in choosing from the vast array of choice on offer, but also in the booming health of the industry itself.

Perfume cornerSo why, when wine journalism is so good, is the general standard of perfume writing so pathetic? A lot of the blame lies with the perfume companies themselves, most of whose press releases somehow manage to combine utter nonsense with flights of pretension so other-worldly that one wonders what kind of prescription drugs their copywriters are on. What’s depressing, though, is how many ‘beauty’ journalists simply copy out the crap that the perfume companies send them, which does nothing to help the poor reader understand what the fragrance in question is about.

The result is a sector dominated by the brands with the deepest pockets and the perfumes with the biggest advertising budgets: it’s as if we’re still stuck in the 1970s days of wine, with most people’s choice limited to the scent equivalents of Mateus Rose and Blue Nun.

Is it any wonder shopping for perfume is such a dispiriting experience? With practically no useful information to go on, how is anyone supposed to make an informed decision when they’re confronted by the hundreds of different perfumes on the shelves of an average department store – especially with over-made-up saleswomen bearing down on them from all sides, spraying noxious clouds of the latest big-name scent in their direction?