Читать книгу The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent - Denyse Beaulieu - Страница 8

However, my very first perfume was not French, but American. Its frosted apple-shaped bottle has managed to survive the decades without getting carried off in my mother’s garage sales. It followed my parents when they sold the house where I grew up. It still taunts me whenever I go home to visit …

Geneviève certainly meant well when she picked Max Factor’s Green Apple for me as a parting gift before she followed her husband to Saskatchewan. She must have been told it was suitable for young girls. I hated it. Unlike Rive Gauche, which had given me a glimpse of the woman I aspired to become, Green Apple didn’t tell a story. Or if it did, it was a story I didn’t want to hear in my first year in high school; a story that contradicted my training bra and the white elastic band that had already cut twice into my budding hips, holding up Kotex Soft Impression (‘Be a question. Be an answer. Be a beautiful story. But be sure.’) What it said was: ‘Don’t grow up.’

Wear Green Apple: He’ll bite, insinuated the Max Factor ad. Never mind that apple candy has never registered as a powerful male attractant and that I’d never been kissed by a ‘he’, much less bitten. I’d attended Sister Aline’s catechism class and I got the Garden of Eden reference behind that slogan, thank you. But to me, that bottle wasn’t the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It was Snow White’s poison apple. And an unripe one at that, just like me. The only apple-shaped things I wanted to own were starting to fill my A-cups.

When the good people at Max Factor put out their apple-shaped bottle, conjuring memories of Original Sin and of the Brother Grimms’ oedipal coming-of-age tale, they tapped into a symbolic association which Dior would later fully exploit with another potion in an apple. But that one would be called Poison: the myth of the femme fatale poured into amethyst glass and wrapped in a moiré emerald box – purple and green themselves hinting at venom and witchcraft …

When it was launched in 1985, I’d long grown out of my Green Apple trauma and into the twin addictions of ink (usually purple) and perfume. I hoped to become a writer, and a fragrant one at that. I’d just finished writing my Masters dissertation on 18th century literature and I was struggling through my first academic publication in France, an essay on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, when I stumbled on an article about Poison, ‘a spicy perfume blending Malaysian pepper, ambergris, orange blossom honey and wild berries’. This was particularly serendipitous: the whole point of my essay was that the adulterous Emma Bovary’s aspiration to become a romantic heroine despite the mediocrity of her provincial surroundings was the result of her mind being poisoned by cheap romantic novels. A farmer’s daughter married off to a small-town doctor, she grew so frustrated at not being able to live out her girlhood fantasies that ‘she wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris.’ Emma never got closer to Paris than Rouen but she managed to run up such a debt with the local frippery pedlar that her house and belongings had to be auctioned off, whereupon she poisoned herself with arsenic. In my essay, I contended that the ink she had absorbed when reading romances had poisoned her every bit as much as the rat-killer.

‘What I blame [women] for especially is their need for poetization,’ Flaubert wrote in 1852 to his lover Louise Colet. ‘Their common disease is to ask oranges from apple trees … They mistake their ass for their heart and think the moon was made to light their boudoir.’ As neat a forecast as ever was of what would drive perfume advertising one century hence. Weren’t we all modern embodiments of Emma Bovary, I thought, seeking magic potions to transform our lives? To die or live in Paris … And now, a legendary couture house where a latter-day Bovary could well burn through her husband’s earnings was selling an intoxicating – and perhaps toxic – dream of romance and glamour under the slogan ‘Poison is my Potion.’

When the CEO of Christian Dior Parfums, Maurice Roger, first decided, in 1982, to launch Poison, the industry had been undergoing deep mutations. Perfume houses were being bought up by multinational companies, and their new products had to have global appeal. With the blockbusting, take-no-prisoners Giorgio Beverly Hills, America was starting to bite into a market that had hitherto been dominated by France. To make itself heard around the world in the brash, loud, money-driven 80s, the house of Dior had to create a shock. This, Maurice Roger knew, meant renouncing the variations on the name ‘Dior’ which had been used to christen all their feminine fragrances from the 1947 Miss Dior to the 1979 Dioressence; it meant foregoing Parisian ‘good taste’ and striking with an unprecedentedly powerful scent and concept. It meant re-injecting magic, mystery and a touch of evil into something that was no longer for ‘special moments’ (think of that fragrance your grandmother kept on her dressing table and only dabbed on when she pulled out the mink and pearls), no longer a scent to which women were wedded for life, but a consumer product. The magic, this time, would be entirely marketing-driven, though the fragrance itself, selected out of eight hundred initial proposals, required over seven hundred modifications before reaching its final form.

The promotional campaign kicked off with a ‘Poison Ball’ for 800 guests at the castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte hosted by the French film star Isabelle Adjani. And, if the bottle was reminiscent of the story of Snow White, the advertising film conjured another fairy tale, The Beauty and the Beast. Its director, Claude Chabrol, never hinted that the would-be femme fatale might be the one to succumb, Bovary-style, to the potion it touted. But I’m sure Chabrol, who would go on to direct an adaptation of Madame Bovary, had a thought for one of his film heroines, the eponymous and fragrantly named Violette Nozière, a young prostitute found guilty of poisoning her parents in 1934 (both characters played by the exquisitely venomous Isabelle Huppert).

‘Who would offer someone a gift of poison?’ the New York Times fashion editor wailed. And Dior’s blockbuster did, in fact, wreak havoc in its wake. Innocent bystanders complained of headaches and dizziness; diners were put off their food by its near-toxic intensity. It was banned in some American restaurants, where signs read ‘No Smoking. No Poison.’

Perfume is an ambiguous object, forever hovering on the edge of stink: what smells suave to me can be noxious to you, and the padded-shouldered juices of the 80s gave the first ammunition to the anti-perfume movement. Google ‘perfume + poison’ today and you’re just as likely to find entries about Dior as exposés on the purported toxicity of fragrance. Perfume aversion is no longer fuelled by the strength of the smell of perfume but by fear of the invisible chemicals that might be infiltrating our bodies through our skin and lungs. Activist groups have been flooding the internet with ominous warnings about ‘unlisted ingredients’ which sound as if they belong in some mad scientist’s lethal cocktail and would be enough to put off anyone but the staunchest fragrance aficionado. And since perfume, unlike anthrax, radiation, or the toxins in building materials, food and water, is both perceptible and dispensable, it’s crystallized a rampant paranoia. If you start obsessing that the woman in the next cubicle is poisoning you with her Obsession, at least you can do something about it: file a lawsuit.

But the fear of smells itself, brilliantly explored by the French historian Alain Corbin in his 1982 classic The Foul and the Fragrant, goes back millennia. Until the link between germs and disease was established in the late 19th century, people were convinced smells could kill. As far back as the 5th century AD, physicians were accusing foul odours of causing plagues. Since nobody knew how illnesses spread, it seemed logical to suspect the airborne stench rising from graveyards, charnels, open cesspools or stinky swamps. And no less logical to suppose that the stench, and hence the disease it carried, could be repelled by another, stronger smell. Aromatic materials were not only considered salubrious because of their medicinal properties: they were also believed to be the very opposite of the corruptible animal and vegetal matters whose putrescence was thought to cause disease. In fact, they were just about as pure as earthly matter could be, since aromatic resins burned without residue, and essential oils were the volatile spirit that remained after the distillation of plants. Those very same aromatic materials were used to prevent corpses from putrefying. Could they not prevent the corruption of the living body by disease as well?

So ‘plague doctors’ stuffed them in beak-shaped masks as they made their rounds during epidemics of the Black Death; aromatic materials were burned in houses, churches, streets and hospitals. And if the wealthy lavishly scented their clothes and held pomanders to their noses, it wasn’t only to cover up the effluvia of the great unwashed or the stench of cities and palaces: scent was their invisible armour against the Reaper. In fact, if everyone from kings to paupers did give off quite a pungent aroma from the late 15th century, when public baths were shut down for moral reasons (they often harboured prostitutes), until the late 18th century, it was precisely because foul miasmas were believed to carry disease. Physicians were convinced that water distended the fibres of the body, leaving it wide open to airborne contamination. Therefore, bathing was undertaken only under strict medical supervision, and people who’d just bathed were advised to stay under wraps for hours, if not days, until their bodies had sufficiently recovered to withstand exposure. Such cleanliness as there was came from washing face, teeth and hands with various cosmetic preparations; bodily grime was meant to be absorbed by white linen shirts, which only the upper classes could afford to change daily.

But the very notion that perfume had curative or protective properties implied that it could have the reverse effect, at least potentially. In Ancient Greece, the word pharmakon, from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived, designated both the poison and the remedy. If aromatic essences could act on the body by penetrating through the nose or skin, they might also kill. Odours are invisible: unlike poisonous foods which you can choose not to eat if you suspect something is amiss, you can’t defend yourself against them – you can’t hold your breath forever. And strong, apparently pleasant fragrances could very well conceal subtle poisons.

In the midst of the religious war that tore France apart in the late 16th century, the Catholic Queen Catherine de’ Medici was thus suspected of having assassinated the Protestant Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, with a pair of poisoned gloves made by her perfumer Renato the Florentine. Though unfounded (Queen Jeanne died of tuberculosis), the accusation gives an indication of the ambivalent properties attributed to perfume. Even natural fragrances were suspicious. In 1632, in a clear-cut case of collective hysteria, the nuns of a convent in Loudun accused the priest Urbain Grandier of having cast a spell on them: the first to be ‘possessed’ by the charismatic Grandier claimed she had been bewitched by the smell of a bouquet of musk roses. Grandier was burned at the stake for witchcraft.

By the middle of the 18th century, some of the very aromatic materials that had been considered both exquisite and prophylactic were being condemned. Substances of animal origin such as musk, civet and ambergris were lumped in with putrid matters through medical anathema. The smell of musk, for instance, was compared to that of manure or fermented human excrement. Its very strength unsettled ‘our more delicate nerves’, wrote Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encyclopaedia in 1765. As the upper classes renewed their acquaintance with water and came to enjoy light, vegetal scents such as the eau de Cologne, wearing heady animalic concoctions became the sign not only of doubtful hygiene but of depraved tastes, fit only for skanky old libertines and their whores.

Perfume would remain a remedy until 1810, when Napoleon decreed separate statuses for perfumers and pharmacists: since the latter were compelled to disclose the composition of their preparations, the former chose to relinquish any medicinal claims to preserve their trade secrets. But perfumers never completely shook off the ambivalence of the original pharmakon … No wonder a perfume-phobic pharmacologist’s daughter ended up sticking her nose in it.

If I wanted further proof that perfume is indeed toxic, I’d filch my dad’s old lab coat to analyse the 1999 Hypnotic Poison, whose red bottle contains the antidote to the green one I was given over twenty years ago: Snow White’s poisoned apple, ripe and fit at last for a grown woman.

Was the perfumer Annick Menardo aware of what she was doing when she stuck an almond note into its jasmine sambac, musk and vanilla accords? As any reader of classic English murder mysteries knows, you can tell whether a victim has been poisoned with cyanide from the lingering smell of bitter almonds. In fact, like apple seeds or peach and cherry pits, the bitter almond contains a highly poisonous substance, amygdalin, which in turn contains sugar and benzaldehyde, a common aromatic ingredient that smells like amaretto liqueur, but can also yield cyanide. And thus, Hypnotic literally reeks of poison disguised as a delicacy, its toxicity betrayed by the slight bitterness of caraway seeds rising from a powdery cloud …

I’d long wanted to ask Menardo about that almond note, and lay my love at her feet for what must surely be one of the weirdest scents to come out in a mainstream brand, Bulgari Black. When I wear Black, I feel that I’ve either a) dropped my liquorice macaroon in my cup of lapsang souchong, b) powdered my butt with fancy talcum and slipped on my rubber bondage skirt, c) crossed a tough neighbourhood where someone’s been burning tyres in a cab that’s got one of those little vanilla-scented trees dangling from the rear-view mirror, or d) been guzzling the world’s peatiest single malt whisky and gargled with Shalimar to hide the fact.

But getting in touch with the brilliantly gifted Menardo was a daunting task. Perfumers working for big companies are much less accessible than independents like Bertrand Duchaufour. You can’t just cold-call them – least of all Menardo, who is famously reticent and uncompromising. Every time I brought her name up, insiders would wish me luck. And I did get lucky: while visiting the offices of Firmenich, where she works, I bumped into her in a corridor, a tiny bristling dark-haired sprite in a hot-pink top. It seemed awkward to spring my question about almonds – how pleasant can it be to be waylaid by some strange woman on your way to a meeting or to the loo? So after gushing about Bulgari Black (she gruffly responded, ‘But that’s old stuff!’), I let her go, contacted her again through email, and we made a phone appointment so that I could ask her about Hypnotic Poison.

So: did she work in the almond note on purpose? She chuckles.

‘I didn’t psychoanalyse myself. It’s possible.’

She explains she worked on the idea of toxicity by playing on the strength of the smell: ‘I knew I had to do something that was meaner than Poison.’

I point out to Annick that the apple seems to be a leitmotif in her career: another one of her best-sellers, the anise and violet Lolita Lempicka, which came out the same year as Hypnotic Poison, is also packaged in an apple-shaped bottle. She answers that apple itself is one of her fetish notes – a fond memory of a shampoo she used as a teenager, Prairial – so she sticks it in wherever she can. By this time we’re chatting away quite happily, and I confide the story of Geneviève’s poisoned parting gift.

‘Green Apple? Hey, I wore that too when I was a kid!’

My phone almost drops from my hand. The formidable little witch who whipped up my antidote to Green Apple actually wore it herself. There are no coincidences with perfume: it’s all black magic.