Scented wanderings: perfumes of tomorrow?

One thing I find interesting about perfume people is that we actually take the time to smell our world, stop and think about it. Every spring since coming to our 'forever home', I've taken to documenting some of the natural scented phenomenons I encounter.

Last year I noted that despite what's so often said - i.e., that Cherry blossoms lack any real fragrance - the truth is that cherry blossoms have a very lovely scent.  I can see why people might make the assumption that cherries are scentless, though. Last year, their odor was so fleeting that you could really only detect it on the first day of the tree being in full bloom. The fragrance, although not the flowers, had faded away completely by the next day.

But this year things were different with our cherry tree. A series of late season cold rain storms hit our area and caught the poor little cherry right at the start of her bloom. The bees wouldn't set so much as an antenna out of their hives as we sat watching the cold drizzle. The first blush and then the full bloom went forth, ignored. But with probably only a third of the blossoms left in bud (the rest had already withered and wasted), the sun finally did come out. And our tree responded with one of the strongest, sweetest fragrances I've ever smelled, and to imagine it was coming off our cherry tree. It filled the entire yard with its papery honey sweet scent. Very pretty. But it served an important purpose as well; every bee in the county must have known the cherry was desperate for their services.

I don't know that I think often enough about how much local conditions and practices impact the quality of the essences used for perfumes, and how much luck plays into building some of those stunning fragrances- whether extracted directly from plants, or, as technology advances, from specific head-space samples. But as consumers begin to demand more of a 'unique' experience from their fragrance choices, these types of specific scent portraits will strongly impact future perfumes. We will find more and more perfumers and companies seeking to design scents that capture these highly personal, idiosyncratic moments.

A harbinger of the trend is seen in Kenzo's collection of travel scents, e.g., 7:15 in Bali; 5:40 pm in Madegascar; 10:10 am in Sisley... which may go on to become highly collectible fragrances in the future. The forerunner of the trend is found in nearly every vintage perfume you've ever owned that contains naturally harvested flower essences.  The fact is that many of the essences we find in vintage scents have since become extinct... and that's something I'll be pondering the next time I reach for something to spritz (or buy).

If you find this topic interesting, please see a related post by Octavian of 1000fragrances where he gives details of his future vision for where fragrance trends are heading...

The Vintage Perfume Vault, where the scent of yesterday's vogue lives.

images: 
Kimika at Cherry blossom festival, from flickr
cherry blossoms from google image search
little geisha girls: yeinjee.com

Vintage New Orleans: Magnolia Rene Perfume

Today in California it is rainy, windy and cold, a typical February spring day but terrible Oscar's weather. Never mind, the fruitless pears are in full bloom here. All this rain puts me in the mood for a New Orleans spring day. The weather in New Orleans was always warm even when the sky filled with dark daytime clouds. There are Magnolia trees growing in California, which surprised me at first but the ones I've found are nearly scentless, nothing like the ones in New Orleans. The way magnolia perfume hangs in the warm, heavy air just before an electric storm, when everything else has become perfectly still, yellow tinted; that's a headspace I want to capture. (Edit: perhaps Kenzo Fleur de Magnolia can take me there... )

However all I have here, now is a nice old dimestore perfume called Magnolia by Rene of New Orleans. Magnolia smell is hard to describe. It's similar to jasmine, and similar to gardenia, but not really like either. It's sweeter with rubbery-waxy hints and a carbenuba, shoe-polish note. This perfume captures the magnolia of my memory perfectly. As it warms, it becomes more spicy, faintly medicine tinged, like sweet cream tinged with saffron and thinned with coconut milk. The dry down has faint civit-honey and hay notes with a fleshy, almost necrotic undertone. Something in that base reminds me of fresh leather, or the smell the flower gives off as it over-ripens, when the thick petals begin to turn slightly nutty and brown.

The quality of this fragrance is hard to judge. You can't even find a perfume that smells like this today (that's NOT a good thing), yet it was just a cheap little novelty back then, a small souvenir or token from a date back when it was new. So what if it doesn't have great performance characteristics, and leaves just enough to smell a trace after only a couple of hours! The bakelite cap does look sort of nerdy, but I really love the stepped shoulder design of the the little art deco bottle.

The Vintage Perfume Vault, where the vintage vogue lives.