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weekend distraction: Sali’s perfume tour

I’ve mentioned before how much I like and am willing to listen to Sali Hughes, the beauty editor for The Guardian. She’s sensible (with a kind of dry, intelligent humor I like), well-researched, well-spoken, and we share a soft spot for perfume and tarty makeup. Her recommendations are solid across the board and she has this great In the Bathroom series of interviews I enjoy, where she interviews friends of hers (about their beauty routines and favorite products) in their bathrooms. I don’t know her really, of course, but I like her. One gets the sense, reading and watching her, that she smokes and swears and makes excellent observations, and you’d want her at your party.

She’s made a video walking through her favorite perfumes and it is just the kind of mini-introduction to excellent perfumery I wish I’d had ages ago and still find useful and interesting now. She has great taste, with stress on high quality ingredients and complexity of scent. Her favorites include a mix of masculine and feminine, intellectual and fun, and she moves through quickly enough to keep interest, peppering the tour with great bits of data for the perfume-curious.

[I want to do a tour along these lines myself. Still working on video over here but it’s only a matter of time.]

I’m definitely going to seek out samples of a few of the unfamiliar scents she highlights here (esPECIALLY that Roja Dove vetiver, but I’ve been meaning to look into Atelier Cologne and more of the Frederic Malle line as well), and, though it’s no coincidence, am pleased to note that a number of her favorite brands are favorites of mine as well. Take note of the brands she highlights, as they are great ones to look at (I mean, look into getting samples of – get samples! Try fragrances on your skin before you buy!). Even if your favorite scents are not her favorites (and why should they be?), these are brands producing beautiful fragrances worthy of being called perfume. They are, in many cases, not inexpensive, and this is no coincidence, either.

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smell this: musk oil

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 Musk is an ancient perfumery ingredient classically derived from muscone, the glandular secretion of the musk deer, though there are some less commercially viable alternatives from other animals (muskrats, snakes, turtles, beetles, ducks, crocodiles…). Nearly all current musks are created with synthetic muscone, the natural ingredient being now astronomically priced, though many are made with its close chemical relative civetone (which may be real or synthetic). Their common thread is the slightly sweet—think honey, not cane sugar—, slightly sour or even fecal odor of a living body, none too clean.

While there is a broad range, from the barbaric [imagine the unwashed warrior with diligently clubbed beast, who will now rest for a while on his bed of furs before the fire and dry the sweat from his copious chest hair. Imagine Serge Lutens Muscs Koublaï Khän] to the clean, sweet animalic [imagine a freshly bathed kitten], I find musks I like in every register*. Most I have come across are somewhere in the middle: sweet and warm, spicy, possibly powdery, slightly soapy and/or floral. They tend to be spicy and enveloping, great for cold weather. My favorite thus far has to be Frederic Malle’s Musc Ravageur, a particularly refined musk (reading almost as an amber at times) with beautiful elements of winter spices like cinnamon and clove.

*A warning that musks, and especially musk oils, will be too cloying in their sweetness for many. And they are not for those who want to mask their body with an un-body-like smell (which I do not typically want to do). I urge you to smell them, though. They are one of those scents that people tend to experience with bizarre discrepancies, some people being virtually or totally anosmic to certain elements in the musk; picking up all sweetness or no sweetness, all fecal or no fecal.

I am not uniformly interested in oil as a vehicle for perfume but find it especially pleasant and effective for something so sweet and complementary to the skin as musk [N.B. a rollerball applicator is nice for perfume oils]. The oil renders the fragrance more persistent on the skin and seems appropriately intimate, oil gradually being absorbed into the skin seeming to me more intimate than a gradually evaporating alcohol spray. The oil is particularly amenable to layering, too. I can sometimes find musk too sweet, at which times I like to layer the oil with a bright floral (or just anything) to subtly alter its character.

I have two on rotation at the moment. The first is a natural Egyptian civet blend I found for few dollars on Amazon (there are dozens of similar ones, it seems). This is a soapy (as if you are smelling a bar of musk scented soap) floral with a mild musk element; light, powdery, feminine. A really excellent use of $5.99 to my mind. The second is C.O. Bigelow’s Perfume Oil in Musk, still largely clean but with the musk taking a more prominent role, the florals, spice, and powder muted. By ‘clean’ here I mean that the musk has been dolled up in such a way as to seem tame, domesticated, inoffensive. This is quite similar to Kiehl’s Musk Essence Oil, though that is a little sweeter and muskier, I think [discovered “in a vat labeled “Love Oil” in the late 50s” (!)]. Either makes a wonderful winter masculine.