35
‘I want to make the most beautiful oriental perfume possible,’ Bertrand writes in an email, and suddenly I realize he’s right. Duende is so much its own creature to me that I’ve never thought of fitting it into a slot, but the soft, balsamic accords and resins that form its base are indeed the core of the oriental, also known as the amber fragrance family. How in the world did that happen? Orientals are not my favourite genre. My inclination runs to the more tightly corseted, sensuous yet intellectual chypres. Had I been an oligarch’s bit of arm candy commissioning a bespoke perfume, I wouldn’t even have requested the notes found in Duende. But if Duende is an oriental, it is because Seville dictated it.
It was as one of the jewels of the Moslem world that Ishbilya, as it was then known, shone most brightly in the Middle Ages, as brilliant and refined a capital as Baghdad and Damascus. Its great cathedral, the Giralda, rose around a minaret whose twins still stand in Marrakech and Rabat; the cathedral’s patio of orange trees was once the courtyard where the faithful performed their ritual ablutions. To this day, from the jasmine-choked alleys of the old Jewish quarter to the fountains glimpsed behind the wrought-iron grilles of its traditional casas de patio, Seville still winds its way into the world of the Arabian Nights. And yet this gateway to the East became the door to the West: the gold splashed on the altars of its Renaissance and Baroque churches was ripped away from the entrails of the Spanish Americas; the treasures of the New World that passed through Seville until the late 16th century turned it briefly into one of the wealthiest cities in Europe.
Seville’s dual nature – looking to the East as one of the westernmost outposts of the Moslem world, then to the West as the treasure chest of the Spanish colonies – is reflected in the very notes of Duende. The incense comes from Arabia. The orange tree first grew in Asia. Lavender and cistus labdanum are Mediterranean. But vanilla and tonka bean originated in the Americas. Of course, you could say that almost every perfume is a blend of essences that found their way into the perfumers’ palette after travelling the trade routes of the planet … Or, conversely, that perfume is oriental by its very essence, no matter what you put into it.
Sophisticated extraction methods were already developed as far back as Ancient Egypt, but it was the Arabs who revolutionized perfumery with the distillation of alcohol and rose water. Their techniques were then imported into the West along with aromatic materials through the Crusades and the merchant port of Venice.
But the modern perfume family called ‘oriental’ has little to do with the blends of Egypt, the Levant or the Middle East. Though it may be reminiscent of the sweet musky scents of the perfumers’ souks, it is a Western reinvention, in the same way that Western artists, craftsmen and poets reinvented the Orient as precious goods were imported, travellers brought back tales and literary works such as The Thousand and One Nights were translated. Harems inspired fevered dreams of unfettered sexuality, as well as being a pretext for painters to depict voluptuous nudes. Writers like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, Flaubert and Gautier turned the trip to the Orient into a literary genre. Inevitably, sultanas, odalisques and slave girls wound their way from paintings, poems, plays and operas onto perfume bottle labels. The fragrances were only vaguely related to Eastern blends through the resins and balsams that had featured in perfumers’ palettes for centuries, such as benzoin, whose soft, powdery, spicy smell is partly owed to vanillin. Vanilla itself had been in use since the time of Louis XIV; after vanillin was first synthesized from clove oil in 1874, it found its way into perfume formulas because it was stronger and cheaper than vanilla tincture (the pods soaked in alcohol), though still a high-end material. Matched with cistus labdanum and bergamot, it formed what is known as ‘amber’.
The oriental note as we know it seems to have originated in the mid-19th century in a perfume called Opoponax, by the British perfumer Septimus Piesse. But it was Aimé Guerlain who perfected it after the discovery of vanillin allowed him to overdose the note in Jicky, which hovers between the oriental and the fougère. The amber accord was later ‘extracted’ and sold as a base by raw material suppliers. François Coty mined this rich olfactory seam with his 1905 Ambre Antique, whose bottle referenced antiquity and whose fragrance, built around a base called Ambréine Samuelson, echoed the blends of Ancient Rome with their rich amber, resins and cinnamon. Coty would go on to invent two templates of the oriental family with the 1905 L’Origan, the ancestor of the spicy floral orientals later epitomized by Opium (the first product actually to be called ‘oriental’, according to the historian Elisabeth de Feydeau), and the 1921 L’Émeraude, which also featured a sweet oriental accord but with stronger aromatic and hay-like effects reminiscent of the fougère family. But though their early boxes displayed Persian-style motifs, none of the Cotys played overtly on oriental connotations.
It was not the Napoleon of Perfume but the Pasha of Paris, Paul Poiret, who capitalized on the Orientalist wave that washed over pre-World War I Paris in the wake of the Ballets Russes (Rimski-Korsakov’s Scheherazade debuted in Paris in 1910) and of a new, unexpurgated and therefore vividly erotic translation of The Thousand and One Nights by the Egyptian-born Dr Jean-Charles Mardrus. Poiret had turned chic Parisiennes into sultanas with his harem pants and turbans; in 1912, he hosted an extravagant One Thousand and Second Night costume party staged with the help of Dr Mardrus. Unlike Coty’s, Poiret’s fragrances did explicitly refer to the Orient, with names like Minaret, Aladin or Nuit de Chine. And, according to Octavian Coifan, it was Poiret’s Orientalist vision rather than his use of the traditional materials of oriental perfumery that led us to associate certain fragrance types with the Orient, most notably the carnation, violet and sweet notes already found in Coty’s 1905 L’Origan, which Poiret reprised in the 1912 Chez Poiret.
But it is Shalimar, launched by Guerlain at the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels, which would give its name to Art Deco, that is identified as the first oriental in modern perfume history. The reason is simple. Like Chanel N°5, it is one of the few continuously produced fragrances of the pioneering years. Like N°5, it is still widely sold and supported by lavish advertising campaigns. So in the same way that N°5 is claimed to be the first abstract perfume or the first perfume to use aldehydes, because the other contenders to the title are all but forgotten except by a handful of experts, Shalimar can claim to be the first oriental. But just as Chanel N°5 was, if not the first abstract fragrance, the first to display a consistent identity as such (the name, the bottle, the box, the notes), Shalimar was the first perfectly accomplished example of the oriental style. It had the notes. It had the name, inspired by the 17th-century Shalimar (‘abode of love’) gardens in Lahore. It had the romantic back-story: Shah Jahan, the son of Shah Jahangir, who laid out the gardens, was none other than the builder of the Taj Mahal, erected in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It had a correspondingly exotic ad featuring a veiled Indian woman, though other ads designed for the Anglo-Saxon market played both the oriental and Parisian cards by showing the Champs-Élysées: ‘The chic, the verve that is Paris … The mysterious, compelling allure that is the Orient … The inspired admixture of both … That is Shalimar.’
* * *
Though the Shalimar talcum powder I bought as a teenager is still tucked away in the closet of my bedroom in my parents’ flat, I was never a Shalimar girl. Perhaps because, unlike its elder sister Mitsouko, it is almost too easy to love with its powdery notes that are a molecule away from veering into the edible. The boudoir where Shalimar flaunts her cleavage is clearly built over a patisserie: trust the French to segue from one kind of carnal appetite to another, turn them both into an art form, and bottle the result. As far as orientals go, Duende is actually a little nearer to the pastry platters of the Islamic world with its orange blossom, almondy tonka bean and honeyed beeswax.
An Iranian friend who once asked me to help her find a new perfume added: ‘But not too oriental. With my type, that would be overkill.’ There is nothing particularly exotic about my own physique but I am inclined towards Mediterranean plushness and I sometimes wonder whether that wasn’t what drove me eastwards, where whatever charms I possessed would be appreciated. Going from Montreal to Paris was a logical, cultural leap over the ocean. But I had to come to Seville to start appreciating a body that had never consented to conform to contemporary Western norms. It is in Seville that my sensuous world pivoted on its own axis, just like the world itself had pivoted from East to West in Andalusia in 1492, when the last Moorish stronghold, Granada, fell into the hands of the Catholic kings the very year Christopher Columbus was claiming the Western Indies for them. Duende is an echo of my journey. The alchemical blending of the East and West, of oriental ancestry and French art, of materials from the Old and the New World … The quintessence of my quest for the place where my body and soul belong. Southwards. Eastwards.
* * *
‘Would you be willing to fly to Beirut tomorrow?’
The call came five years ago. I’d been warned by the business consultant who’d introduced us in Paris that Habibi wanted to use my services as a ghost-writer. When he phoned a few days later, I was invited – nay, summoned – to Beirut, rather like a scriptural call-girl. The details were arranged by a male secretary: I was to be flown business class, picked up by a chauffeur and accommodated in a boutique hotel on the Corniche. I accepted because I was, as often in my freelancing life, pressed for money, but also because it seemed very Graham Greene to be flown in on such a secret mission.
Habibi picked me up in the lobby at eight, a tall man in his late forties with the lazy, imperious manner of a first-born son and garter-belt-snapping eyes. In my standard-issue Parisian black I felt like a sparrow caught in a flight of birds of paradise among the designer-garbed Middle Eastern female clientele, but Habibi claimed he was glad to be seen with a woman who still had the nose God had designed her with: he was bored with what Beirut had to offer. In fact, I came to understand as we chatted over dinner, Habibi was bored, period, since he’d sold off his business. I waited for him to tell me what job he’d asked me over for, but clearly this was a matter that would be dealt with later on.
‘Do you have a lover at the moment?’ he suddenly asked me.
Oh. So it was that kind of bored. I didn’t make much of a fuss, answering that there had been someone, but that our affair had petered out because Monsieur was so much busier than when we’d met that he couldn’t properly attend to me.
‘So it stopped by suspension of payments,’ Habibi purred.
I chuckled. He wasn’t wrong, though his interpretation was, perhaps typically for a Lebanese businessman, couched in the terms of a financial transaction.
It was past midnight when we drove off into the April drizzle, and the car wandered in the eerily new city centre rebuilt on the model of French colonial-era architecture, pastel buildings encrusted with the glittering windows of Gucci, Prada and Burberry shops, a Disneyworld for label-shoppers edged with gutted buildings and the ruins of apartment blocks abandoned before they were completed at the outset of the civilian war. Beirut’s lopsided smile, with its pristine implants alongside decayed stumps, was oddly compelling.
We did eventually broach the purpose of my trip over whiskies in the bar of my hotel. There would be a couple of people to meet who might be interested in writing their memoirs. I took an option on a vanity book for a lady friend of Habibi’s, and then Habibi took an option on me.
As he never got up before noon, he let me have the chauffeur for the morning. But the chauffeur spoke neither English nor French and I struggled with what I thought was the Arabic for perfume, attar. The chauffeur’s eyes in the rear-view mirror were puzzled until I resorted to miming dabbing my wrist and sniffing it, until he nodded ‘itr’, then ‘aywa’, yes.
I had envisioned some funky little shop where an elderly gentleman speaking French with the soft-rolling Lebanese ‘r’s would show me rare blends. But when the chauffeur triumphantly opened the door, it was to usher me into the black marble mausoleum of a Saudi perfume company that had a Paris branch I’d never set foot in. I was swiftly attended to by a slender young man who looked as me as tenderly as if he’d wanted to slide a spoonful of mastic ice cream between my lips, and who proceeded to display what seemed to be half the contents of the shop. I’d never had experience with oil-based perfumery, which this was: when they’re not airborne by the evaporation of alcohol, the aromatic materials develop in a very different way. The face I was making clearly demonstrated I had not partaken of Botox. Then the piastre dropped: most of these fragrances seemed to be directly inspired by Western blockbusters.
My purveyor of sweetness saw he wasn’t reeling me in so he took out choicer bait: the oil of Taif roses, the most highly prized in the Middle East, grown at an altitude of two thousand metres in Saudi Arabia. As I kept shaking my head, he whittled it down to a few drops for one hundred dollars. I started backing away slowly as he held out the little crystal bottle:
‘If you want one perfect thing in your house…’ he cooed.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t like rose that much.
‘Ma chérie, you should have asked him to show you the oud,’ said Habibi over his morning coffee after greeting me with a spine-dislocating hug. ‘The Saudis keep giving me oud chips. I’ll get you some before you leave.’
He never did.
* * *
Had I dawdled in the shop a little longer, I would have discovered a bit more about the thriving Middle Eastern perfume industry. The region must have the highest per capita consumption of perfumes in the world. Several companies, based locally or in Europe, put out blends that are either secular formulas, knock-offs of successful Western scents in oil, Western formulas with oud added, or products of a new perfume family called ‘French-Oriental’ that typically revolves around an oud and rose accord.
The use of oud, also known as agar wood, aloes wood or jinko, goes back centuries: it is mentioned in the Sanskrit Vedas and the Old Testament. It is the olfactory signature of the Middle East, though it is also highly prized in India and Japan, and either burned in chips to steep rooms or clothing with fragrant smoke. The essential oil can be mixed with other notes, often in homemade blends, or worn as a ‘backdrop’ to Western fragrances.
Oud is a resin that forms when a type of mould infects the heartwood of certain varieties of the Aquilaria species, found mainly in Southeast Asia. Though the trees can be injected with the mould, much of the production is harvested in the jungle. Only one out of a hundred trees is infected, but as it’s impossible to tell from the outside, many trees are just chopped down for expediency, most often by poachers, endangering the species (it is now protected). And as the merchandise usually goes through several middlemen, it can, at times, become costlier than gold.
The note first made its first official appearance in a mainstream Western fragrance with M7, launched in 2002 by Yves Saint Laurent under Tom Ford’s tenure. The scent’s animal sexiness was underscored by the first ever perfume advertisement featuring full-frontal male nudity, dangly bits and all. Since then, in their mad scramble to woo the juicy Middle Eastern market while they figure out how to get a peg in China, Western perfume companies have been chucking oud into their more exclusive collections.
With some niche enthusiasts, oud has become a fetish of sorts, to such an extent that I’ve come to think of it as a cultural artefact rather than an aromatic material. Its leathery, medicinal, smoky facets tick all the right boxes among hardcore perfume aficionados: because it is such an acquired taste for Western noses, embracing oud is a way to show you can take it like a man, whatever your gender, not unlike ‘skank’.
But it’s more than that. I suspect the current Western oud mania is the latest guise of Orientalism. Back when few people actually travelled all the way to the ‘Orient’, dabbing on Shalimar garbed in one of Poiret’s harem get-ups was enough to turn you into an odalisque. Now that booking a flight to Dubai or Bangkok is no more complicated than planning a weekend in Normandy, we need a more genuine marker of exoticism, and oud is that, just as patchouli used to be for the hippies. As such, it is every bit as much of an oriental fantasy as Shalimar; an appropriation of the Other through what is most other: smell. Not to mention that splurging on it puts us, at least symbolically, on the same footing as the sheiks.
But years before the West discovered the Middle Eastern ‘authenticity’ of oud, the Middle East itself was indulging in its own Western fantasy by hiring French perfumers to produce fragrances in the grand French tradition, just as that tradition was dying out in the West. Thus the house of Amouage, founded in 1983 by a member of the royal family of Oman, kicked off with a classic aldehydic floral – probably the first straight-faced interpretation of the genre since First in 1976 – composed by the veteran Guy Robert, who authored Madame Rochas (1960) and Calèche (1961). Jubilation 25, put out in 2007 to celebrate Amouage’s twenty-fifth anniversary, was yet another fin-de-race fragrance, this time from the chypre family.
In English, the expression fin de race translates as ‘degenerate’, which doesn’t convey the aristocratic connotations of the French. Someone who is fin de race is the last of a noble lineage whose excessive inbreeding has exaggerated every family trait to the point of caricature: think Habsburg chin or Bourbon nose. And Jubilation 25 is indeed fin de race in many ways. In it, Femme’s dark plum has fermented into booziness; its spices have risen to nose-tingling prominence, while oak moss is further darkened by leather-scented clouds of incense. The scent also exhibits more than a trace of Opium’s DNA, with its aldehydic shimmer and resinous-fruity myrrh facets: its author Lucas Sieuzac is, after all, the son of Jean-Louis, who co-signed Opium with Raymond Chaillan. Somehow this opulent iteration of a classic genre fatally compromised by the public’s disaffection and increasingly stringent regulations on the use of oak moss feels like a chypre that doesn’t know that chypre is dead. The news may not have reached Oman yet.
The Middle East may actually be the last place really to believe in perfume enough to infuse lifeblood into the decaying flesh of old-school French perfumery, much in the way that the Japanese are the last who truly believe in fashion, as anyone who attends Paris fashion week can observe. As though classic French perfumery, after a century of oriental fantasies, was catching its last reflection in a mirror held up by the real Orient.
* * *
Bertrand has worked for Amouage and his boozy-fruity, incense-laden and spice-sprinkled Jubilation XXV, the masculine pendant of Jubilation 25, was an early foray of his into oud, a note he may have pioneered in the West by introducing it in the 2001 Sequoia for Comme des Garçons. Now he’s nose-deep in it: his clients are frantic for French-Oriental. At first I grumbled that the note had become such a cliché I didn’t even want to smell what he’d come up with: I was ouded-out. Then I caved in and asked him what it was about oud that excited him so, and watched as he became the intense, enthusiastic man-child his favourite raw materials always seemed to turn him into.
He described oud as resinous, ambery, with smoky and leathery facets reminiscent of castoreum, all of which I could figure out for myself. And then it all poured out: why it spoke to him so deeply. And I understood that oud might well be the missing link between his calling as a perfumer, his far-flung journeys and the antique tribal art he collects … He told me how oud had a sour milk note that reminded him of the bottom of old wooden South Ethiopian milk pots he’d bought, of temples in the Himalaya, of kitchens in Nepalese houses, of the antique Tibetan furniture he owned which still held the smell of the rancid yak butter that had been kept inside it. Oud was the smell of the Other for him, I realized, but in a carnal, primal way rather than as a piece of exotica. It was the smell of the Other within; a connection with odours once familiar to our common core of humanity he sought out in his travels.
Oud is burned like incense, and, as it happened, I’d been thinking about incense along those lines. Why it was so profoundly moving to people from so many cultures; why cultures all over the world seemed to burn incense-like substances in their spiritual quest … As though some part of us remembered the bits of fragrant wood our remotest ancestors might have thrown into their campfires in East Africa where our species was born, or perhaps as they migrated through the Arabian Peninsula, the very places where the trees that yield incense grow. And going, further back, I thought of smoke. Couldn’t the smell of one of the things that made us human, the ability to make fire, be somehow imprinted into our genetic memory? Was that why fragrances with smoky notes had such an emotional impact on us? Bertrand agreed as we quietly breathed in the penetrating wafts of the oud.
‘We’ve cut ourselves off from our ancestral memories,’ he said. ‘Smells are one of the only ways to regain what we’ve lost.’