The Dirty ’30s
Tabu, Scandal, Shocking (1930–1939)
The 1930s was the decade of the Oriental fragrance—not only as a category with sumptuous notes, but because of the decade’s preoccupation with exotic fantasies of distant lands: the hot Moroccan desert winds that blow through Lucien Lelong’s Sirocco; the French colonies of Jean Patou’s Colony, with its tropical plantation accords of pineapple and rubber; and Tuvaché’s campy Jungle Gardenia, invoking an island paradise. Even the decade’s most famous floral, Joy, although not in the Oriental category, is loaded down with that category’s decadence and richness.
Joy by Jean Patou (1930)
This 1937 ad marketed Joy as “the costliest perfume in the world” during the Great Depression.
Perfumer: Henri Alméras
Released during the Great Depression and provocatively described as “the world’s most expensive perfume,” Joy, conceived by Jean Patou as a decadent gift to his American consumers, is considered to be one of the greatest floral perfumes ever created.
Joy is a velvety profusion of florals, with rose, jasmine, and ylang-ylang in their most decadent, gilded glory. Perfumer Jean Kerléo, Alméras’s successor, claimed that Joy’s richness comes from its jasmine and Bulgarian rose—not its base notes. Its voluptuous drydown has an almost tropical flower/coconut feel.
In spite of Joy’s luxe reputation, my favorite anecdote about the perfume is on the louche side, and comes from GQ writer Glenn O’Brien: It’s rumored that the Rolling Stones’s grizzled bassist Keith Richards has worn Joy under his armpits for years. Rather than diminishing Joy, this makes me give even more props to Keith for his excellent taste.
Top notes: Leafy green, aldehydes, peach, blossom-calyx notes
Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris, orchid, lily of the valley
Base notes: Sandal, musk, civet
Je Reviens by Worth (1932)
Perfumer: Maurice Blanchet
With three floral notes that can be read as irredeemably old-fashioned to modern noses—lilac, hyacinth, and violet—Je Reviens nevertheless balances them with sensuous balsamic notes against smooth sandalwood, moss, and vetiver. The reformulations have been roundly panned (“Like bug spray” was a common refrain), so stick to bottles that are labeled paris, france. What’s missing in later reformulations is the rich, woody base.
Top notes: Aldehydes, orange blossom, violet, bergamot
Heart notes: Clove, hyacinth, jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, orris, lilac
Base notes: Vetiver, tonka, tolu, amber, musk, sandalwood, moss
Jungle Gardenia by Tuvaché (1932)
Jungle Gardenia by Tuvaché was love at first sniff. Some perfumes dillydally around, making small talk, trying to get to know you, requiring that you buy them dinner and learn their childhood pets’ names and personalities, and so on. You may not be sure how you feel about them at first, but in time, love—true love—can happen. Jungle Gardenia was no such demure date. It bypassed all of my brain’s rational vetting systems and said, “Kiss me, you fool!” And kiss it I did.
With tropical wet gardenia and bubblegum-sweet tuberose bursting from its center, flanked by fresh green top notes and an erotic base of balsams and musk, Jungle Gardenia goes straight to the perfume brain’s pleasure center. Subtlety, thy name is not Jungle Gardenia.
But then again, gardenias are not the most subtle of flowers. Team gardenia up with tuberose, and you can just kiss free will good-bye. I’m convinced now that gardenia and tuberose, two of the girliest perfume notes often disparaged as “too grandma,” are in fact two of the most badass perfume notes in the perfume lexicon.
Billing itself as “The world’s most exotic perfume,” Jungle Gardenia is exotic in the way Hollywood movies set in the South Seas starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope were exotic, with all the signifiers of exotic exaggerated and staged just so (big flowers, vines, a pile of sand, one coconut tree, tanned women sporting leis). And yet, I could see how this perfume—like an actual white gardenia affixed to an ordinary ’50s hairdo—could have made your average American housewife feel like Dorothy Lamour.
Although it came out in the 1930s, I wonder if Jungle Gardenia didn’t have its heyday in the 1950s. It seems like a very 1950s perfume, sunny and fun yet carnal in that healthy, smiling American-woman way. (It certainly helps that the tuberose in Jungle Gardenia really does smell like pink bubble gum, and it’s reputed to have been a favorite of Elizabeth Taylor.)
Apparently, Tuvaché was a New York–based company that felt it needed to be in French drag to compete with the popularity of French scents at the time. Its owner even went so far as to concoct a pen name, Madame de Tuvaché, and I bet she would have thrown a circumflex in there somewhere if she could have!
Tuvaché’s Jungle Gardenia has been discontinued for a while (in its original form, anyway). I have not tried the Germaine Monteil, Yardley, Jovan/Coty, Irma Shorell, or Evyan versions, which are said to have taken over. A few ways to figure out if you have the original formula?
- Check to see if it’s by Tuvaché.
- See if it’s made in New York.
- Does it make you swoon?
(Heeley’s Bubblegum Chic wouldn’t be a bad substitute if you wanted a modern version.)
Notes not available.
Surrender by Ciro (1932)
From 1923 to 1961, the American perfume brand Ciro created daring perfumes with gorgeous Baccarat-designed bottles and colorful, often surreal perfume ads. With Surrender, violet and white flowers rest on a balsamic base of amber-vanilla with a lovely, spicy incense bite. Powdery orris, like a silk charmeuse gown flowing over the perfume’s body, softens its edges.
Notes not available.
Prior to the 1970s, perfume ads often targeted men as purchasers of perfume for women. In this 1940s-era ad for Ciro’s line of perfumes, the silhouette of a puzzled man simply asks, “Which?” To the left is Ciro’s entire range of perfumes, meant for different types of women. Danger is for the woman who likes “very dry martinis and fast cars,” and New Horizons, for the woman who “looks ahead—moves ahead—and has a head!”
Tabu by Dana (1932)
Perfumer: Jean Carles
In the same way that people want to drink a full-bodied red wine or drink a peaty scotch on winter days rather than, say, a vodka grapefruit, perfume lovers often veer toward fragrances in the Oriental category when it’s cold outside. A classic perfume in this category, Tabu provides the winter warmth you’re looking for and offers heat in other ways: It was created to project overt sexuality.
Created by perfumer Jean Carles of Ma Griffe, Shocking, and Miss Dior fame (which he created with Paul Vacher), it’s said that Dana’s brief to Carles was along the lines of, “Make a perfume a prostitute would wear.” Perhaps this was a signature; fans of Carles’s other fragrance, Ma Griffe, have said that their grandmothers called that perfume “the prostitute’s perfume,” and both Shocking and Miss Dior have a whiff of ladies’ undergarments about them.
This 1950s-era French ad for Tabu, “The Forbidden Perfume,” had a decidedly S&M bent. (Artist: Camilla)
Sweet, ambery, spicy, and complex, Tabu’s sweetness comes from heady florals, clove, benzoin, and amber rather than the expected vanilla, which doesn’t appear, surprisingly, as a note. (Benzoin resin from the styrax tree’s bark has a pronounced vanilla facet embedded in heavy-cream richness, which accounts for the vanillic impression in Tabu.)
Go for demure perfumes if you must, but for me, if loving perfume that was made for prostitutes is wrong—I don’t wanna be right.
Top notes: Bergamot, orange, neroli, coraner, spice notes
Heart notes: Clove bud, ylang-ylang, rose, jasmine, narcissus, clover
Base notes: Patchouli, civet, cedar, vetiver, sandalwood, benzoin, amber, musk, oakmoss
Angélique Encens by Creed (1933)
Angélique Encens (Angelica or angelic incense) is heavenly, an animalic as light as a cloud, but with darkness and bite. Angélique Encens’s angelica, vanilla, and ambergris echo Shalimar’s holy trinity of bergamot, vanilla, and animal base. More ethereal and less carnal than Shalimar, Angélique Encens’s head is in the clouds, befitting its name.
Angélique or angelica is a genus of about sixty kinds of herbs in the family Apiacea that have a peppery, herbal, earthy, woody, and musky odor. Angélique is also a pun on the word angelic, with its connotations of heavenly, sweet, and divine.
Angélique Encens’s initial peppery/herbal notes combine with nose-tickling incense, followed by the downy-softest vanilla, with a musky, civet-like animal note hovering in the background. Its florals are very much in the background like the perfume’s silver lining, adding sensuality from behind the scenes. The animal note recedes in the drydown, and you’re left with a whisper of a vanilla skin-scent. (This is a review of Creed’s final stock of Angélique Encens before they—unwisely—discontinued it.)
Top notes: Angelica
Heart notes: Rose, jasmine
Base notes: Vanilla, incense, ambergris
(Notes from Creed’s website before Angélique Encens was discontinued.)
Reflections by Ciro (1933)
Boozy, rich, spicy, and vanillic, Reflections is in the Tabu/Styx Oriental family of perfumes, with an intense amber, patchouli, and powdery base, maybe with orris and sandalwood.
Notes not available.
Scandal by Lanvin (1933)
A toga-clad woman holds Lanvin’s distinctive, round black bottle like an offering from the gods. The bottle features the Lanvin logo—a stylized depiction of designer Jeanne Lanvin and her daughter in gold—designed by illustrator Paul Iribe.
Perfumer: André Fraysse
Scandal may start off too sweet for some tastes, like a Choward’s violet candy. But once the flowers dissipate, what remains is a cozy (if unscandalous) scent of faintly sweet leather and tobacco. Of course, I think we can understand why it must have seemed scandalous to have an elegant, perfumed lady smell like she’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes (at the time, still seen as déclassé) and fallen asleep in the leather interior of a car the night before!
Top notes: Neroli, bergamot, lemon, mandarin, clary sage
Heart notes: Leather, orris, rose, ylang-ylang
Base notes: Olibanum, civet, oakmoss, vanilla, vetiver, benzoin
Secret of Venus by Weil (1933)
Secret of Venus, Weil’s perfume for women (rather than for furs, like Zibeline and Chinchilla Royal), opens with symphonic herbaceousness, moves into a spicy floral heart, and rests on a velvety, honeyed Oriental base. Its drydown is an irresistible mix of sweet balsams, incense/spice, and an almond-oil facet from tonka. A little like Le Numéro Cinq and Coty’s Styx in style and personality, if a bit sweeter.
The first time I took a whiff, Secret of Venus did that animalic/raunchy lurch that tends to mean that civet is prowling around, but it could just be a really animalic musk. It’s ironic that a perfume in a line meant to hide the smell of the animal in fur can’t resist throwing some animal back into the perfume.
Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, lemon, coriander, tarragon
Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, orris, gardenia
Base notes: Vetiver, civet, sandal, amber, musk, honey, tonka
Sous le Vent by Guerlain (1933)
A sculptural face in profile sets sail in artist Darcy’s 1930s-era illustrated interpretation of Guerlain’s Sous le Vent, which literally means “Under the Wind.”
Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain
A forbiddingly beautiful chypre, Sous le Vent (“Under the Wind”) has the depth and sumptuousness of an ornate Oriental tapestry, with threads of gold and pastel satin panels set against a black velvet backdrop.
Initially, it appears to be a friendly chypre with a lavender-bergamot top shot through with lovely amber-vanilla. But like smoothing down velvet to watch it change color from light to dark, I notice as I reapply and resniff Sous le Vent that its complexity comes through with spicy, powdery carnation and the inimitable Guerlain vanilla touched with amber.
Masks are signature images in Corday perfume ads, but they’re usually depicted as festive or beautiful. This one, from 1936, almost looks like a death mask or something from a horror film. Beautiful, but scary.
I get an almost zesty-green top married to rich florals, with Guerlain’s rich base throwing its magic scrim over all the notes, softening them with its moondust. Sous le Vent is said to have been created for Josephine Baker, the American performer who electrified 1930s Paris in shows at the City of Light’s famed Folies Bergère theater.
Top notes: Basil, bergamot, lavender, tarragon
Heart notes: Carnation
Base notes: Oakmoss, iris, woods, patchouli
(Notes from Victoria Frovola’s perfume blog Bois de Jasmin.)
Vol de Nuit by Guerlain (1933)
An ad (c. 1943) for Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit
Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain
Named after the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novel about night pilots in the early days of aviation, Vol de Nuit (“Night Flight”), the scent, translates the mystery, danger, and poetry of night flying into perfume notes.
Vol de Nuit’s balance of disparate notes is part of its mystery: It starts off green, citrusy, and dry; moves toward a subtle floral heart; and evolves into an orris/vanilla and amber drydown with a mossy finish.
The perfume’s surprise, and what pulls everything together, is its heart of tentative sweetness, from a facet of the narcissus and a subdued jasmine combined with amber and vanilla. It’s as if the dark night sky (the coldness of galbanum and citrus?) suddenly revealed a twinkling star, and the loneliness and danger of flying turns into an existential adventure, exhilarating instead of treacherous. The moss and resins help to maintain the perfume’s austerity and gravity, but it’s that moment of warmth that creates Vol de Nuit’s emotional center.
Notes not available.
A’Suma by Coty (1934)
Perfumer: Vincent Roubert
Nodding its hat to the exoticism and Orientalism of the time, A’Suma has the familiar bergamot, lavender, vanilla, and civet impression of Jicky, Shalimar, and Emeraude. Like Lucien Lelong’s Sirocco, A’Suma, with its haunting addition of incense, adds a flinty, austere character to this otherwise sumptuous perfume, like the smell of a lit match. In advertisements of the time, A’Suma is described as “opulent,” “as exotic as a moonlit beach in Bali,” and with the “sensuous allure of a siren’s song.” I can’t disagree with that.
Notes not available.
Bambou by Weil (1934)
A woody Oriental perfume with a beautiful lavender opening and rich, balsamic drydown, Bambou is akin to Tabu and Youth Dew, without much sweetness. Perhaps due to the age of my sample, Bambou feels like it’s almost all base notes, with an almost cocoa-coffee facet that gives it an earthy quality. The reformulation is its polar opposite: fruity and light.
Notes from ThePerfumedCourt.com: Lavender, jasmine, rose, carnation, lily of the valley, cedar, tonka, musk, sandal
Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden (1934)
Perfumer: George Fuchs
Lavender and neroli join hands at the beginning of Blue Grass to do a little dance together, lavender’s herbaceousness balancing out neroli’s sweetness, both of them announcing summer. Its intense, sweet florals may be too much for some, but Blue Grass balances its fresh top notes with its woody and balsamic base, interpreting summer as ripeness rather than as freshness. I read somewhere that Elizabeth Arden used to spray her horses with Blue Grass! I bet the smell of this on stinky horsehair would have been amazing.
Top notes: Aldehydes, lavender, bergamot, neroli, orange
Heart notes: Jasmine, carnation, narcissus, rose, tuberose
Base notes: Sandalwood, benzoin, tonka, tonquin musk
Fleurs de Rocaille by Caron (1934)
Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff
With a prominent powdery and sweet floral opening characteristic of this era, Fleurs de Rocaille is nevertheless greened with narcissus, spiced with carnation, and eroticized with Ernest Daltroff’s je ne sais quoi brand of sexy fairy dust. This happy floral has just enough spice and bite to keep it modern.
Top notes: Palisander (Brazilian rosewood), bergamot, gardenia, violet
Heart notes: Jasmine, narcissus, rose, carnation, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, lilac, mimosa
Base notes: Amber, sandalwood, musk, cedar
Nuit de Longchamp by Lubin (1934)
In Nuit de Longchamp, sweet lilac and moody violet combine with woods, moss, and a nitromusk-rich base to create a perfume that feels paradoxically innocent and erotic. Nitromusks, and perhaps tonka, contribute to a sweet/vanillic/cinnamon heliotrope-like fattiness in the base that provides such a wonderful counterpoint to the delicate lilac note that floats above Nuit de Longchamp’s base of dark woods like an iridescent butterfly in a forest.
Notes from 1982 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Lilac, jasmine, oakmoss, violet, musk, chypre base
Rumeur by Lanvin (1934)
Perfumer: André Fraysse
A gourmand leather and tobacco fragrance so beautiful it belongs to a rare scent category for me: perfume so good I want to drink it. Dark vanilla and creamy white florals voluptuously bloom as leather, tobacco, and civet rise up. Peach and plum add some bruised sweetness.
When I visualize Rumeur, I imagine those dark, fleshy, oddly colored orchids that you can hardly believe are flowers. My Sin and Baghari are white and sensual flowers—Rumeur their darker cousin. Its addition of costus, the perfume note that smells a bit like sebum/bed-head, takes Rumeur’s uncanny, singular sexiness to another level. It’s in my top five favorite vintage perfumes of all time.
In this fanciful 1956 ad by artist Al Janvic, who illustrated a whole series of perfume ads for Lanvin featuring street scenes, Lanvin perfumes are individually represented by circus figures.
The 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France describes Rumeur as “a spicy fragrance featuring cyclamen, gardenia, vetiver, patchouli, violet leaves and amber. It evokes a fragrant forest, orchards under the sun, and oriental flowers … It is an evening perfume that will mostly appeal to brunettes.” According to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, Rumeur is a fruity chypre between Mitsouko and Femme.
Notes from Octavian Coifan: Peach, plum, dark vanilla, nutmeg, cardamom, clove, civet, costus, tobacco, and Cuir de Russie (“Russia Leather”) bases prepared by Synarome
Sirocco by Lucien Lelong (1934)
“Here in a serpentine vial is the mystery of the East,” reads the copy on this 1943 advertisement for Lucien Lelong’s Orientalist fantasy in a bottle. Sirocco is the name for the desert wind that blows from North Africa to Europe.
Perfumer: Jean Carles
Named after a Mediterranean wind that comes in from the Sahara, Sirocco, like Emeraude and Shalimar, combines a citrusy top note with rich vanilla and balsams. With a stunning lavender and vanilla heart enriched by benzoin and spiced by patchouli, this gourmand Oriental perfume is a dark, sensual experience, and has a more mysterious aura than the brighter Emeraude and the friendlier Shalimar.
According to the 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France, Sirocco, as befits its name, is “a warm and heady fragrance evoking the immensity of the desert sands … ideal with furs and during elegant society events under starry skies.” Good to know! Its dusty, dry, incensey backdrop adds a wonderful counterpoint to its rich, balsamic base.
Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Citrus, lavender, benzoin, patchouli, vanilla
Indiscret by Lucien Lelong (1935)
A river of clove runs through the kingdom of Indiscret, picking up fresh bergamot, mandarin, jasmine, and rose as it continues to snake its way down. By the time it reaches its incense and amber/vanillic/woody base, it settles into an intensely sensual, rich, spicy, ambery base. Indiscret is said to have been Lauren Bacall’s signature scent, which makes sense, because both of them smolder. Perfumer Yann Vasnier describes Indiscret as a spicy, animalic Oriental perfume, detecting from an intact perfume nip notes of clove, jasmine, carnation, aldehydes, and vanilla.
Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Carnation, rose absolute, jasmine, woodsy notes
Jean Naté by Charles of the Ritz (1935)
If a lemon went to finishing school, it would smell like Jean Naté.
Soft, powdery, complex, and sophisticated, this old gem (the old-school Charles of the Ritz cologne spray, anyway) is sunny without being ditzy. It starts out with an herbal, lemon opening, followed by a smooth, woody finish warmed by tonka.
Notes from Fragrantica.com: Citrus, lavender, jasmine, rose, carnation, lily of the valley, cedar, tonka bean, musk, sandalwood
Voulez-Vous by D’Orsay (1935)
An intensely green/floral chypre with hints of tobacco and civet, Voulez-Vous (or “Would you like to …?”) is about as subtle as its name suggests. Voulez-Vous’s florals, along with its aggressive greenness, can be observed through its tobacco-tinged animalic drydown, which acts like a come-hither veil of smoke. Perfumer Yann Vasnier describes Voulez-Vous as a chypre leather similar to Miss Dior, with galbanum and rose. In a 1960s ad for Voulez-Vous, a woman stares down her unseen prey as she lights a cigarette. Describing her look as “bedroom eyes” would be the understatement of the year.
Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Green, woodsy, and fruity notes with jasmine and lily of the valley
Canoe by Dana (1936)
Perfumer: Jean Carles
Ever the provocateur, Jean Carles not only enjoyed making perfumes for loose women; he also loved gender-bending in fragrances. Even seasoned noses might have a hard time telling the difference between masculine Canoe and Carles’s Ambush, for women. Both are fougères (Canoe more classically, because of its addition of oakmoss), and both differ only by a few notes: Canoe has patchouli, carnation, and oakmoss, and Ambush does not. And the sweetness is more prominent in Ambush, whereas Canoe upped the aromatic quality.
Fougère (for “fern” in French) is a traditionally masculine category of perfume that originated with Fougère Royal (1882). Its base comprises lavender, oakmoss, and coumarin, giving it an herbaceous, mossy, and vanillic-warm character.
Top notes: Lavender, clary sage, lemon
Heart notes: Bourbon geranium, carnation, cedarwood, patchouli
Base notes: Vanilla, tonka, musk, heliotrope, oakmoss
Muguet des Bois by Coty (1936)
Perfumer: Henri Robert
Muguet des Bois (“Lily of the Woods”) smells clean, but unlike some more-abstract clean scents, it’s reminiscent of nature, and therefore impregnated with complexity. From the hint of musty lilac to a bright lemony-rose, there is an artful artlessness to its loveliness.
Edmond Roudnitska, who created his own version of a lily-of-the-valley fragrance with Diorissimo, greatly admired Coty’s Muguet des Bois, and believed that no one had ever created a better lily note. (Unlike most floral notes, lily of the valley’s scent cannot be extracted into a stable essential oil; only reconstructions exist.)
Top notes: Leafy green, bergamot, orange, aldehydes
Heart notes: Lily of the valley, lilac, cyclamen, rose, jasmine
Base notes: Sandalwood, musk
An ad for Muguet des Bois by Coty, c. 1948
Blue Carnation by Roger & Gallet (1937)
When I first dabbed Blue Carnation on, its sharp and herbal opening salvo was so unfamiliar and harsh (with a prominent anise facet) that by the time its predominant, dense clove-cigarette accord arrived, I was truly baffled and put off. This stuff is strong!
But I love acquiring tastes, and it didn’t take long for me to cozy up to Blue Carnation. Or, rather, it cozied up to me. Round, velvety, spicy-sweet clove is a comforting note, not one you encounter very often in modern perfumes, and when you do, as in Serge Lutens’s Vitriol d’oeillet (2011), it seems tame in comparison.
Notes: Carnation, clove, eugenol, iso eugenol, salicylates, vanillin, milky Indian sandalwood
(Notes from Yann Vasnier.)
Ancient Chinese secret, huh? This 1937 ad for Bourjois’ perfume Kobako manages to commit multiple offenses against a progressive person’s idea of ethnic sensitivity. A white woman leans in as a presumably Chinese woman whispers secrets of her “allure and desirability” behind a splayed-out fan. One of those secrets is the “Oriental essence” that can be found in Kobako, which means “small box” … in Japanese. Sigh.
Carnet de Bal by Révillon (1937)
Perfumer: Maurice Schaller
Although it’s often categorized as a spicy Oriental perfume, Carnet de Bal (“Dance Card”) is not heavy, dark, or mysterious. It opens with citrus, fruit, and a prominent ylang-ylang note, but its pronounced mossy, woody, and spicy base gives the fragrance its primary character. Although civet and musk rear their naughty heads now and then, Carnet de Bal never veers into dirty-dancing territory. In the drydown, the floral notes peer through the moss and vanilla, creating a gentle yet spicy scent that lingers on the skin.
Top notes: Citrus oils, chamomile, fruit
Heart notes: Cyclamen, rose, lily, jasmine, ylang-ylang
Base notes: Patchouli, civet, amber, musk, moss, vanilla
Old Spice by Shulton (1937)
Perfumer: Albert Hauck
Old Spice, like so many scents, seems arbitrarily gendered as a masculine fragrance when compared to its contemporaries, and to later women’s spicy Oriental scents (such as Cinnabar and Opium). With citrus and herbal top notes and a spicy balsamic base, Old Spice is simply the more-restrained, less-sweet version of New Spices that came down the pike.
Top notes: Orange, lemon, spice notes, anise, clary sage, aldehyde
Heart notes: Carnation, cinnamon, geranium, jasmine, heliotrope, pimento
Base notes: Musk, vanilla, cedarwood, olibanum, benzoin, tonka, amber
Prétexte by Lanvin (1937)
Perhaps we don’t hear about Prétexte as much as its famous siblings because, as the middle sibling in the Lanvin lineup, it has their features (the animalic base of My Sin, the boozy smoothness of Rumeur, and the woods and hint of Scandal’s tobacco), but in diluted and mishmash form.
Prétexte is a woody-ambery chypre with a smooth, powdery, spicy, and animalic base. At first sniff, I must admit, it does remind me of other scents without necessarily drawing me to it. Still, pretty nice stuff, especially in the sexy drydown. Perfumer Yann Vasnier smelled a spicy powdery rose with hay, leather, and castoreum.
Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Amber, hawthorn, rosewood, narcissus, oakmoss, patchouli, iris
Shocking by Schiaparelli (1937)
Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s friendship with and influence from the surrealist movement was evident in her playful designs, including her iconic dress-form-shaped perfume bottle for the perfume, Shocking. In this charming 1940s ad illustrated by Marcel Vertès, a woman wears bunny ears in Schiaparelli’s signature color, “shocking pink.”
Perfumer: Jean Carles
Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with surrealist artists like Salvador Dali and incorporated surrealist elements into her beautiful and whimsical designs. Shocking, her first fragrance, was named in part because of the shocking “hot pink” color that was her trademark. Schiaparelli described this electric pink as “bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West — a shocking color, pure and undiluted.”
The perfume translation of shocking pink is equally playful and affirming. A powdery, spicy, honeyed-rose chypre, Shocking’s animalic, sensual, warm base belies its coquettish top notes. To get the full effect of Shocking, one must get a pristine, intact bottle, or crack open a nip, which perfectly preserves perfume in a time capsule.
Top notes: Bergamot, aldehydes, tarragon
Heart notes: Honey, rose, narcissus
Base notes: Clove, civet, chypre
Sortilège by Galion (1937)
This 1930s perfume gets a psychedelic ad in the ’60s.
Strawberry, peach, and orange blossom sweeten Sortilège without rendering it teenagerish or immature. Aldehydes are strong in the opening, as orris’s woody powder adds fairy dust to the voluptuous base of balsams, woods, and animal notes. I’ve noticed that sandalwood in vintage scents seems more intoxicating, buttery, rich, and powdery than in contemporary scents. Perhaps I’m smelling the difference between real and synthetic sandalwood.
Boozy, lush, animalic, but ladylike, this is one of those perfumes that, to the untrained nose, might be described as “smelling like my grandma.” Well, maybe if your grandma was Colette or Marlene Dietrich …
Top notes: Aldehyde complex, bergamot, peach, strawberry, orange blossom
Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, orris, lilac
Base notes: Vetiver, sandalwood, vanilla, tonka, opopanax, civet, musk
Aphrodisia by Fabergé (1938)
Aphrodisia (“for the night-blooming you”) is a luscious and complex floral chypre bursting with fruity sweetness and tempered with spice, mossiness, and animalic warmth.
A great example of an animalic perfume that isn’t dark and brooding, Aphrodisia radiates joy and warmth, and has the olfactory color palette and texture of those rich-hued Art Deco works by Tamara de Lempicka. If this is the drugstore version of a once-grander Aphrodisia, perfume lovers back in the day still had it better than we do. (Or at least, better than women on a budget today.) Perfumer Yann Vasnier described Aphrodisia as spicy (due to its clove note), soapy, and with a “vaguely Mitsouko back.”
Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, neroli, fruit note
Heart notes: Rose, honey, ylang-ylang, carnation, jasmine
Base notes: Oakmoss, vetiver, civet, ambrein, musk
Colony by Jean Patou (1938)
In this 1938 ad for Jean Patou’s Colony perfume, it’s unclear if the eyes peering mysteriously over the pineapple-shaped bottle belong to the colonized or to the white colonizer. Either way, racialized darkness is at the heart of its colonial fantasy.
Combining pineapple with a leather-chypre base, the wonderfully weird Colony was, at Paris’s Exposition Coloniale in 1931, an argument in perfume form for France’s colonial exploits. Colony hits my nose with rubber, chypre mossiness/woods, and a tart-turned-golden-sweet pineapple note, finally drying down to rich amber and benzoin. (Not incidentally, pineapple and rubber are two exports from countries that were colonized by France.) Although there’s not an easy relationship between the pineapple and the leather/moss notes, Colony somehow works.
The Baccarat-designed bottle, which is the design version of a Freudian slip, looks like both a pineapple and a hand grenade, as filmmaker and perfume writer Brian Pera has noted. This visual pun celebrates France’s spoils from the tropics while (unconsciously) intimating that they were gained through violence. Insofar as one can psychoanalyze a perfume bottle (and why not?), the hand grenade / pineapple could be said to embody Colony’s ambivalence as a champion of colonialism.
Top notes: Pineapple, ylang-ylang
Heart notes: Carnation, iris, vetiver, opopanax
Base notes: Leather, musk, oakmoss
Intoxication by D’Orsay (1938)
A pair of lovers straight out of a Marc Chagall painting kiss one another as they float above a city in this intoxicating ad from 1946.
As unabashedly vintage as a cigarette holder in the hands of a woman with a 1930s-style moon manicure, Intoxication by D’Orsay lives up to its name. Its sharp florals are sexy and bright rather than dark and dangerous, like Narcisse Noir, or verging on cloying like Fracas.
A spicy floral with an animalic undertow, Intoxication is similar in personality to Revlon’s Intimate: There’s something playful and fun about its sexiness—something American, maybe, rather than French.
Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin
Heart notes: Rose, orange blossom, jasmine, lily of the valley, nutmeg, ylang-ylang
Base notes: Vetiver, patchouli, vanilla, sandalwood, tonka, musk, benzoin
Jealousy by Blanchard (1938)
For everything in our pornified world that is shown visually, a dimension seems to be subtracted from perfume. Repression, in other words, must have been really good for scent. Jealousy, a floral chypre, starts off as an innocent corsage of intensely sweet notes (honey, lilac, and hyacinth?). Those “innocent” notes are darkened with spice and musk, and then Jealousy dries down to a soft, powdery, and civety base.
Notes not available.
Mais Oui by Bourjois (1938)
Mais Oui is a happy, bright little thing, calling out its friendliness and openness to life (“Mais, Oui!”) in its notes as well as its name. This beautiful floral aldehydic scent has a Femme-like warmth (peach or plum?) with a lovely animalic base that reads as leather. According to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, Mais Oui is overdosed with Animalis, a Synarome base with civet, musk, castoreum, leather, and costus. Rrreow!
Notes from Yann Vasnier: An animalic fougère with a cresolic or “coal-tar” note, clover, salicylates, coumarin, civet
One of perfume copy’s enduring tropes is that perfume allows the proper woman to subliminally express an otherwise scandalous sexuality. This takes a punningly linguistic turn in the name for Bourjois’s Mais Oui. In English, it sounds like a question, even a proposition: “May we?” And in French, the provocative answer: “But yes!”
In this 1950 ad by artist T.B. Sibia, the Lalique-designed columnar bottle of Je Reviens looms on the horizon like a tall building.
Straw Hat by Fabergé (1938)
Violet sings from the heart of Straw Hat, its sweetness rounded by vanilla and woody, hay-like notes. A poetic rendition of summer with violet suggesting a tinge of sentimentality or reminiscence.
Top notes: Lemon, lavender, and geranium
Heart notes: Rose, violet, heliotrope, patchouli
Base notes: Vanilla, musk, sandalwood
Tigress by Fabergé (1938)
Like a riff on Dana’s iconic Tabu, Tigress starts off with a sharp blast of bergamot and a strong amber component underneath the florals. It has a momentary soapiness/powderiness that makes it a lot more ladylike than you would think a perfume called “Tigress” would be.
That soapy/powdery lady is quickly thawed out by a spicy note that gets this fragrance cooking again. Although you can smell the vanilla in the drydown, Tigress isn’t cloying or overpowering. In fact, one of the things I like best about it is how it develops into something fairly dry and mossy, with incensey and even chalky facets. As it dries down, something animalic (a civet note?) lurches forward, only to retreat back into the shadows. Tigress should be a cacophonous mess, but it’s lovely.
Notes from Yann Vasnier: A powdery woody Oriental with moss and vanilla
Alpona by Caron (1939)
Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff
If you’ve ever hiked near the mountains, you know what it’s like to feel as if you’re in multiple climates at once. You can be cold in the valleys in the morning, smelling fresh herbs, aromatic pine, and juniper trees that cool the air with their pungent camphorous scent. Then suddenly, the sun roars overhead, scorching you as you look, blinkingly, at snow on the side of the mountain as your skin begins to burn. Then, just as suddenly, in front of you lies a meadow full of fragrant flowers and maybe a bush or two of ripe fruit.
Introduced in 1939 for the World’s Fair in New York, Alpona—Daltroff’s olfactory tribute to the Swiss Alps—is considered the first fragrance to combine florals with grapefruit. If you’re thinking of it in terms of the bright and watery citrus fragrances of today, think again. Ernest Daltroff’s perfumes always have an edge.
There is also depth in the chypre base, with incense and resins. As Gaia Fishler said about Alpona on her blog, The Non-Blonde: “This is full of what the bureaucrats consider skin allergens and perfume lovers see and smell as beauty.” Amen.
If Chanel No. 19 is a fairy-tale witch lurking in dark woods, providing cool whiffs from the luxuriant undergrowth, Alpona is Julie Andrews singing atop a mountain in The Sound of Music, swirling, larger than life, and joyous. When you get to the base, a stark and smoky incense smolders, ever so slightly laced with its earlier orange note.
Panoramic in its scope and development, Alpona is like a perfume that has discovered 3-D and Technicolor, and sets out to show off what it can reveal to you, in mind-blowing detail. This perfume’s depth and development make many other perfumes feel like shallow lifetime biopics, with crappy music, one-note actors, and cheap sets and wardrobes.
Top notes: Lemon, grapefruit, bergamot, orange
Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, orchid, thyme
Base notes: Patchouli, myrrh, cedar, sandalwood, musk, and oakmoss
(Notes from NowSmellThis.com.)
Confetti by Lenthéric (1939)
A rich amber Oriental in the vein of Weil’s Secret of Venus and Zibeline, Confetti’s balsamic base probably included vanilla, tonka, tolu, labdanum, and other resins that contribute to its rich feel. Whoever is wearing the dark and sensuous Confetti is not in the middle of the room getting hit by sprays of confetti, but in a hidden corner of the party, making out. Its drydown suggests that the musk and civet are prowling around and whispering sweet nothings in the background.
Notes not available.