Letter From Paris: Perfume... Most Parisian of Valentines

Cover of A Natural History of the Senses

Crossposted at HuffPo.com.  Comments not included here.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start to awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away."

                               ---Helen Keller

What are human beings if not a body and mind--physically, materially held together, yet compelled and propelled by our senses? Surely, our first subconscious memories are formed from hearing our mothers' voices and learning to recognize their scents, as they held us close and rocked us to the rhythm of their motherly souls. It was the taste of their milk, the sun that must have been their smiles.

"We live on the leash of our senses," wrote Diane Ackerman, author of the fantastic book A Natural History of the Senses, which is a poetic investigation of these potent qualities of our lives. But it is not just the mere fact that our senses exist--it is their meaning to each and every one of us. We all have our own personal sensuous (and I don't mean sexual) vocabularies. Voices, sights, and aromas are thread through us as near mythical embellishments of our memories, as the Berber woman weaves her own stories in her rugs.

Which sense is the strongest? Which one would you be willing to lose?

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In France, perfume has a long and aristocratic history. From Wikipedia:

....Perfume came into its own when Louis XV came to the throne in the 18th century. His court was called "le cour parfumee" (the perfumed court). Madame de Pompadour ordered generous supplies of perfume, and King Louis demanded a different fragrance for his apartment everyday. The court of Louis XIV was even named due to the scents which were applied daily not only to the skin but also to clothing, fans and furniture. Perfume substituted for soap and water. The use of perfume in France grew steadily. By the 18th century, aromatic plants were being grown in the Grasse region of France to provide the growing perfume industry with raw materials. Even today, France remains the centre of the European perfume design and trade.

After Napoleon came to power, exorbitant expenditures for perfume continued. Two quarts of violet cologne were delivered to him each week, and he is said to have used sixty bottles of double extract of jasmine every month. Josephine had stronger perfume preferences. She was partial to musk, and she used so much that sixty years after her death the scent still lingered in her boudoir....

Doesn't every woman want a bottle of French perfume?

A few years ago, I was given an invitation for a personal meeting with Frédéric Malle, the French creator of Editions de Parfums, which I'd been hearing about in Paris as the chicest of perfumes. I had been meaning to skip down to his charming boutique on the rue du Mont Thabor, which is a street I love in the 1st Arrondissement, but just hadn't made it. But I didn't have one drop of perfume! I needed fragrance. For years, I had worn Paloma (as in Picasso) as my scent signature, but I was a Parisian resident now--and it was time to expand my scent horizons.

Frédéric Malle

My friend Joelle, who has had her bead on the fashion and beauty industries as long as she can remember (she now works for Women's Wear Daily), met up with me there. And we were whisked into M. Malle's world of perfume as soon as we stepped through the door.

If people can have pedigrees to do what they do, then Malle surely has one. His maternal grandfather, Serge Heftler, created the Dior fragrance in 1947 and was also Christian Dior's great friend. This practically puts a crown on Malle's head in France (not to mention that he is the nephew of the late filmmaker Louis Malle and knows a Who's Who of his countrymen as well as internationally). So he was born into and raised with a family tradition in the perfume industry, and had a deep respect for its craft. After college at NYU, Malle went to work in the industry, where he met and learned from the greatest contemporary perfumers.

At some point Malle asked his friends what scents they were wearing, and they said there was nothing interesting on the market. They didn't want to wear their grandparents' fragrances. So Malle decided to start his own company, in which he would be the editor of the greatest noses in the business. Not only that, but these talented people would--get this--receive credit for their creations. The names of the noses would be listed as the authors of their work. It was a changing of the perfume guard.

Editions de Parfum Noses

As a writer, I loved this concept. And as Malle told his fascinating story, I couldn't have been more charmed. Then when we started actually smelling the scents, I was in pure olfactory luxury! These are rich delicious sensuous scents unlike the mass-marketed fragrances, which are perfectly lovely but are made to smell nice on every Julie and Julia around. Malle's Editions du Parfums have their own potent attitudes and are meant to express the wearers with aromatic individuality.

We talked about me, which was ever so kind, while he was conducting his own investigation to get more of an idea of who I was before he made his suggestions for the fragrances that would suit me. And then he sprayed each one into his futuristic-looking tubes, where I could take a whiff and sit back down and luxuriate in its essence before taking another whiff. Each time I could pick up different notes on the perfume's scale. It was a scent education, as well as a few moments of blissful extravagance.

The Futuristic Tubes

M. Malle chose two fragrances for me, and I was flattered and in total agreement. Here is the true test for a woman--or man, I suppose. These Editions de Parfums scents made me smell more like me. They swirled me into their delicious ambience and enhanced my authentic identity. Ultimately, this is a genuine luxury--and one that isn't priced as un-get-table.

The good news is that one doesn't have to come to Paris to buy the perfume, although I highly recommend it! M. Malle's Editions de Parfums can be ordered online through his company, where there is a questionnaire you can fill out and receive fragrance recommendations from his very well trained staff. Barneys New York also carries it.

A bottle or four would be the most Parisian of Valentines. And ladies, you can have your own French lover. Here's the fragrance for your man:

French Lover

                   

                                                                           ---Beth Arnold in Paris