Article Archive
How to store perfume
16 October, 2014
One of the first things many people do when they get a new perfume home, perfectly understandably, is to unwrap it and throw the packaging away. And who can blame them? Perfume boxes are rarely the most exciting things to look at, while a great deal of thought often goes into the bottle, and some bottles are things of beauty in their own right.
The trouble is, this is just about the worst thing you can do, especially if, like a lot of people, you then keep the bottle on your windowsill in bright daylight or in a well-heated bathroom. For perfume is like wine: it degrades surprisingly quickly in strong light or high temperatures, darkening in colour and losing its subtleties of smell.
On the other hand, if you look after it properly, like wine, most perfume will keep for years: I have bottles that I bought ten or fifteen years ago that smell just as good now as they did on the day I first opened them. The key is to keep them dark and cool, and for that purpose the easiest thing to do is to store them in their original packaging. Some people go further still: a pop star I once met keeps hers in a special fridge, which is what perfume companies do as well.
I know it seems a shame to hide a handsome bottle, but then if manufacturers made their boxes more attractive then people would be less likely to discard them. There again maybe that’s the idea, though there are honourable exceptions: take a bow for your boxes, James Heeley, Hermès, Etro and Frédéric Malle.
So, next time you buy a perfume, treat it right. After all you wouldn’t spend £80 on a bottle of wine then keep it in a boiler cupboard, would you?
How to choose a new perfume
13 August, 2014
While I’ve been talking to people about The Sniff Box and men’s perfumes in general, it’s struck me that a lot of men find shopping for perfumes really difficult. So here are some strategies for tackling the sometimes difficult job of how to find and buy a new fragrance, which I’m going to keep on the How To section for permanent reference.
Like a lot of men I’m no great fan of shopping in general, and shopping for perfume is generally even less fun than shopping for food or clothes. I’m a fairly confident perfume buyer, but even I find it quite intimidating to shop for fragrance in department stores or duty free, where the instant you approach a perfume counter you’re borne down on by a series of terrifyingly made-up sales staff of both sexes brandishing bottles of the latest celebrity whiff, which more often than not is toxic enough to strip the lining from your nasal passages.
The other big problem about big stores is that there’s usually too much choice. This sounds like a good thing in theory, but if you’re anything like me, the minute I walk into an overstocked book or perfume store my mind goes blank and my decision-making capacities abandon me.
So my first piece of advice would be not to shop for perfume in duty free or a department store (or even a large branch of Boots). Small, independent perfume shops and pharmacies are hard to find these days, but places like Les Senteurs in London are well worth seeking out. Their staff tend to be better trained, for one thing, and actually know what they’re talking about, rather than just reading off a script.
The other option is to choose a brand you like and visit one of their standalone stores. Obviously you’ll only be directed to their own perfumes, but the chances are that if you like, say, Guerlain’s Vetiver, then there’ll probably be other Guerlain scents you like.
Whichever route you take, it’s worth bearing mind a few points before you go.
1. Don’t believe everything you’re told. I’ve heard sales assistants talk utter rubbish, even in supposedly ‘high-end’ stores. Mind you, I’ve heard customers spouting total nonsense too, so try and learn to trust your nose – if it smells good to you, you’re probably thinking along the right lines.
2. Don’t be swayed by price. High prices are no guarantee of quality, and some of the most expensive perfumes around are (in a word) crap. On the other hand, cheap perfume, like cheap wine, is generally cheap for a good reason. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far between. I try and give an indication of price for most of my reviews, and if a perfume is expensive but worth it I’ll say so.
3. Don’t be a snob. Try and avoid being influenced by packaging and brand names, one way or another. Of course it’s nice to have a good-looking bottle to keep your perfume in, and a lot of people like displaying them on their shelves. But in the end it’s how it smells on you that matters. Some of the ‘smartest’ brands have terrible perfumes in their range, but equally, even the naffest brand can occasionally strike gold: try and smell with an open mind.
4. Don’t impulse buy. It’s very tempting, especially when you’re going on holiday or you’ve got a bit of cash to burn, but if perfumes are any good you want them to last, and to carry on smelling good on you for some time. A lot of modern perfumes are designed to smell great for the first few seconds, but a lot of them don’t last, or turn into something you’d rather not smell of an hour or two later on. So by all means spray yourself silly, but then go away and smell things again. If you live or work near a perfume store, call in as often as you can, and keep sampling different things until you’re absolutely sure you’ve found something that’s worth spending the best part of £100 on.
5. Ask around. Experiment. Sniff. Ask your friends what their favourite perfumes are, and get them to let you try. Try something you haven’t heard of before. And if you sit next to someone on a bus who smells amazing, pluck up courage and ask them what their perfume is: they’re more likely to be flattered than offended.
More recent releases…
25 July, 2014
So many new men’s fragrances come out every year that it would be a full-time job to review them all – and probably not a very rewarding one. But while I’m keen to celebrate my favourites on The Sniff Box, it seems only polite to give brief reviews to some of the recent releases that I’ve kindly been given by perfume companies, even if they don’t (in my view) merit a longer review.
I took the first of these, DKNY MEN ENERGIZING EAU DE COLOGNE SPRAY, into an office where I was working and asked my male colleagues to tell me what they thought of it. After some consideration and a surprising amount of sniffing, they came back with, ‘It’s the kind of bottle you’d expect to see in a teenage boy’s bedroom, but actually it’s not as bad as we expected.’
Personally I think it’s almost indistinguishably generic and very synthetic-smelling, with none of the refreshing citrus of a classic eau-de-cologne, though it is faintly cucumberish or melony. The bottle, incidentally, is an unfeasibly tall rhomboid with a naff transfer of the Empire State Building up one side, a clear plastic cap and a spray button in electric blue. Teenage boy’s bedroom, in other words.
RENSHAW, from Murdock, is the latest cologne from a small British brand which has grown out of a chain of trendy barber shops owned by Irish-born Brendan Murdock. Renshaw was launched during Wimbledon week and, appropriately for a perfume with a tennis theme, smells like grass with a splash of sharp sweetness – though in this case it’s grapefruit, not strawberries. It’s perfectly pleasant, and probably perfect for its intended audience: describing itself as ‘British Cologne’, it’s a little bit Boy’s Own – not too fancy, complex or expensive.
The name JIMMY CHOO MAN gives me the uncomfortable image of a bloke in high heels, which I hope is unintentional. This first (but almost certainly not last) men’s perfume from the high-fashion shoe brand comes in a curved grey-glass bottle with rather 1970s-looking silver lettering, topped off with a matching metal plate and a metal-topped cap wrapped in faux snakeskin.
As for the fragrance itself, it smells at least as chemical as the DKNY Men Energising Eau de Cologne. Generic, in a word, and quite hard to distinguish from, say, Paul Smith Extreme Sport or a hundred other men’s fragrances from the last decade. Though it’s not being released until September, I won’t be holding my breath, though I might be holding my nose.
Random recent round-up
15 July, 2014
Following on from my brief review of Francis Kurkdjian’s latest men’s fragrance, PLURIEL, here are three more recent releases that I’ve been given by generous perfume companies, but that don’t appeal enough to me to merit giving them a full review.
I’ll start with Cartier’s DECLARATION L’EAU. Like the original Déclaration, L’Eau comes in a thin, high-shouldered, easy-(if you’re me)-to-knock-over bottle, and has the same fiddly, easy-to-break spray-closure. It’s also almost impossible to get the bottle back inside the box, thanks to an awkward cardboard liner.
As for the fragrance itself, it’s pleasant enough, smelling fairly fresh and natural when you first spray it on, with lemon and slightly sweaty hint of cumin. It’s not something I’d rush out and buy when there are so many better perfumes to choose from, but at least it’s not objectionable, though the curry-sweat cumin smell doesn’t really appeal to me.
Hermès’ TERRE D’HERMES EAU TRES FRAICHE smells reassuringly expensive, as you’d hope from this brand, with a fresh mandarin eau-de-cologne start; interestingly a trace of spicy cumin comes out after a while, similar though not quite as insistent as the sweaty cumin smell in the Cartier Déclaration L’Eau. At least this is a perfume you actually want to try on your skin.
But what I really like is the classy clear-glass bottle, with its moulded-H base subtly tinted in Hermès orange. It’s an elegantly minimalist design with minimalist lettering, topped with a metal plate and a clever new cap that twists down to reveal the spray.
By way of contrast, Paul Smith’s EXTREME SPORT is horrible in every way. According to its website, ‘the top notes are full of energy and freshness from Florida oranges and a double shot of frosted spearmint. The floral heart of the fragrance combines the original geranium floral facet, with the freshness of lavender – and the unforgettable dry-down signature of incense is enriched with vibrant cedarwood’. That’s one way of describing it: to me it smells like toilet cleaner.
The mingy-looking bottle is no better. A blue-glass square with a cheap-feeling plastic cap, it’s adorned with a nasty out-of-focus transfer of a stop-watch on the back: so sporty. Even the name is naff: ‘Extreme’ and ‘Sport’ being surely two of the most overused words in mass-market men’s perfumery.
Admittedly it’s cheap as perfumes go (under £40 for 100ml), but I don’t think that’s any excuse. In fact all the Paul Smith perfumes are a bit of a puzzle to me: he’s universally admired as such a stylish, switched-on (and by all accounts personally charming) designer, but the perfume packaging has none of the style of the fashion brand, and I haven’t smelled a single perfume in what’s now quite a large range that I’ve liked.
Could the answer be that Paul Smith simply isn’t interested in perfume, or has no sense of smell? Of course I know that designers rarely have much to do with the scents sold under their name, but you’d think that someone as apparently exacting as Smith would make sure that the fragrances were more on brand than they are. For now it’s a perfume mystery.
Francis Kurkdjian
Pluriel
14 July, 2014
Apologies for the recent radio silence: holidays followed by a family drama and so-far unsuccessful job-hunting. Normal service will (I hope) be renewed before long, but in the meantime I thought it might be an idea to do a quick recent-releases round-up of some perfumes I’ve kindly been sent in the last couple of months that don’t, I feel, merit a full review of their own.
I’ll start with PLURIEL, the latest men’s fragrance from the super-talented French-Armenian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. Listening to him at the London launch I couldn’t help but like him: he speaks with such knowledge and passion, and he draws such interesting parallels between perfume and other kinds of artistry. His fragrances are excellently packaged too, with a nesting double box and a nicely proportioned bottle like a chamfered cube.
My problem is that his perfumes just don’t seem to suit me: I’ve tried them all so far and none of them appeal (see my review of Absolue Pour le Matin). The men’s version of Pluriel takes two of the main elements in male perfumery – the smells of lavender and wood – but Kurkdjian has given them a contemporary twist by using lavender absolute rather than lavender oil, and by mixing a number of different woody smells to create an impressionist ‘blur’ of woodiness. As he explains, lavender absolute has the same overall smell as lavender oil, but it has more depth; a bit like playing the same tune an octave lower.
It’s sophisticated perfumery, but while I admire Kurkdjian’s defence of synthetic ingredients, which he compares to Pantone colour charts for giving him a far greater range of effects than natural ingredients ever could, I think that, ironically, it’s precisely their synthetic smell that puts me off his fragrances.
As a professional perfumer with a long and successful industry career, he also says that he wants to create commercial scents: that makes good financial sense, especially for someone running his own relatively small business, but the downside (and again this is just how it seems to me) is that they can end up smelling like pretty much every other big-selling men’s perfume out there, which is how Pluriel smells to me. And given how much thought and care has gone into creating it, I think that’s a shame.
What’s in a list?
11 June, 2014
I’m not a great cook, but even I know that a list of ingredients isn’t much use on its own. I mean, if I was to tell you I was going to make something with butter, sugar, flour and eggs, you wouldn’t really be much wiser, would you? We might all know what butter, sugar, eggs and flour taste like individually, but combine them in one way and you get pancakes; mix them together in another and you get brioche or a Victoria sponge.
Perfume is no different, which is why I get so cross every time I flick through a magazine or click through a website and read a new fragrance described almost entirely by way of its ingredients. Here’s a fairly typical example. ‘XXX blends a wild rose accord with the traditional and mysterious notes of cistus labdanum, amber and benzoin. White pepper, freesia and South American maté leaves add a contemporary touch of clarity…’
It all sounds very nice, and I can imagine what some of those ingredients might smell like on their own, but I really haven’t the faintest idea what they might smell like together – not least because we’re not told which ingredients are used in which proportion. Trying to reconstruct it in your mind’s eye (never mind in reality) would be like have a recipe that listed the ingredients but didn’t give any weights or quantities.
Another problem with listing ingredients is that, in the hands of different perfumers, two perfumes with the same ingredients can end up smelling completely different. I’ve smelled a few myself, where one is great and the other is revolting – and it’s worth bearing in mind the famous story about Ernest Beaux, the creator of Chanel No. 5, who said of Aimé Guerlain, ‘When I use vanilla, I get crème anglaise; when Guerlain uses it he gets Shalimar…’ – one of the greatest perfumes ever made.
It’s tempting to blame time-pressed journalists (of whom there are plenty), rehashing churned-out press releases from the various brands’ marketing departments (some of which are better than others), but actually I think it’s the magazine and newspaper editors who should take most of the blame, with the rest of it going to the perfume industry.
For there are too many new perfumes coming out to cover any of them in much depth (something I’m trying to counteract here at The Sniff Box). And it’s vanishingly rare for a magazine to give their writers enough room to describe a perfume properly, even if they were keen to do so.
The result? And endless gush of virtually meaningless lists, which tell readers almost nothing and do little to help people learn more about perfume or how to describe it. Is it any wonder that perfume is so often dismissed as being frivolous and expensive, when editors – who are supposed to be informing and educating their readers, after all – don’t take it seriously themselves?
London smells
4 June, 2014
I’ve recently been commissioned by the wonderful Uncommon Guide Books to write a chapter for a forthcoming guide to London on the smells of the city – a kind of scent-tour, if you like. The idea is to give visitors some different perspectives from the standard guides, and also, perhaps, to take them to places and areas that they might not otherwise see.
A few things sprang immediately to mind, but I’m keen to make the chapter varied, informative and entertaining, so if you have any favourite London smells then I’d love to hear from you. Though I need to write it quite quickly I’m sure it’s an idea I’ll come back to, perhaps in a different form next time.
My favourite wheeze so far is to try and identify the smell of money, and to that end I met a friend on the steps of the Royal Exchange, opposite the Bank of England, right at the heart of the City of London. We edged our way through the suited rush-hour crowds, as they hurried home and bunched at intersections, trying to work out what money’s smell might be.
Could it be the smart shops inside and around the Royal Exchange, selling perfume and jewellery and expensive leather goods? Or the people themselves, with their varied perfumes and hair preparations, whose scents mix and mingle in minute quantities, apart from the occasional, overpowering exception?
We tried standing by the main bronze doors of the Bank itself, as employees and visitors trotted in and out, but no mysterious fragrances, redolent of bullion or banknotes, wafted out from its marble halls. In the end we decided that if money smelled of anything today, then surely it would smell like the glass-and-steel atrium of a big investment bank – icily air-conditioned, with almost imperceptible traces of testosterone.
Of course the smell of money is an abstract idea in the end, a concept rather than a physical actuality. But great perfumes have been created on far more abstract ideas than that (think of Guerlain’s L’heure bleue, for example), so maybe we should get bottling and selling it. We might even make some money, and then we could bottle that.
The missing ingredient
29 April, 2014
I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time about an ingredient I thought I’d discovered in the majority of the men’s perfumes that have been launched in the last five years or so, which gives them all an intensely acrid, peppery, chemical smell, like a fire in an electricity substation.
For lack of any better information from the perfume companies themselves I was going to call it ‘cheapone’, since it makes anything it’s in smell so cheap and nasty, but now the estimable Lee Kynaston, men’s grooming guru and blogger extraordinaire, has identified it in a feature he recently wrote for the Telegraph.
Dihydromyrcenol is apparently the culprit, and I’m delighted to discover that Lee hates it as much as I do. The reason for its ubiquity, he explains, ‘is that creative briefs for men’s fragrances often require that they “last all day” because men, unlike women, tend to apply once and don’t bother to top up later in the day. The easiest way to deliver that longevity is to throw some dihydromyrcenol into the mix.’
In a way it’s nice to have one’s suspicions backed up at last by scientific evidence, but what would be even nicer would be if our perfume masters stopped using the revolting stuff and found a more attractive ingredient instead. Or even started using their imaginations again, like perfumers did in the days before dihydromyrcenol.
Architectural scent
22 January, 2014
To the preview of the Royal Academy’s new ‘Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined’ show. More, perhaps, of an adult’s (and children’s) playground than a seriously thought-provoking show, but I was very taken with an installation by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, designer (among other things) of the LVMH head office in Tokyo.
In two darkened rooms, Kuma has installed rather beautiful pyramidal sculptures using willowy slivers of bent bamboo, lit by tiny spotlights in the floor. I wouldn’t exactly class it as architecture myself, but what really appealed to me was Kuma’s imaginative use of scent. The first, larger sculpture is impregnated with the smell of hinoki, the fragrant Japanese cedar (Chamaecyparis obtusa), traditionally used in the construction of temples, while the second room evokes the grassy, hay-like smell of new tatami mats.
The scent of buildings is often overlooked, so it’s refreshing to come across an architect who values smell as much as the other senses. Other architects please take note.
Too much
26 May, 2013
As a self-confessed perfume addict, you’d think I would be delighted to discover an entire new shop devoted to rare and unusual perfumes, as I did last weekend in Paris. The shop was Jovoy, between the Tuileries gardens and the Place Vendôme, and at first it seemed like an exciting find, with a remarkably wide range of so-called ‘niche’ brands, from Vero Profumo and Histoires de Parfums to Roja Dove and Juliette Has a Gun.
Some of them I knew already; others I hadn’t heard of before, such as the intriguing LM Parfums, which despite its French name is actually from New York. At first glance this looked like seventh heaven: the range was amazing, the staff were friendly, and if the store design was on the kitsch side, I guess that’s something you could learn to live with if the other stuff was so good.
But why, after about ten minutes, did my heart begin to sink? It’s not that, in all likelihood, there weren’t some brilliant new perfumes to discover, and I have nothing against niche perfumers – they’re perhaps more likely to come up with interesting and unusual scents than the big mass-market companies, though they’re equally capable of creating crap as well.
No: that sinking feeling came on simply because of the sheer number of different perfumes on offer – more than anyone could sensibly smell in days of sampling. It’s the same feeling I get, sometimes, when I walk into an outsize bookshop: the choice, rather than being exhilarating, is actually overwhelming and deadening. Whatever I might have been looking for when I walked in generally goes straight out of my head, and my mind goes blank: it’s a depressing feeling, and that’s exactly how I felt in Jovoy on the Rue de Castiglione.
The perfume market is saturated, just like the market for so many other things. And the result is confusion for the consumer (me), and a smaller and smaller share of the market for each new perfume brand. Obviously there are still huge profits to be made in perfume or there wouldn’t be this ever-increasing number of launches and new brands, but I can’t help wondering how long this endless expansion can last. Just like in Jovoy last week, it makes me tired simply to think about it.