For me, Billie Holiday’s voice, her recordings, are going to be a zillion times more beautiful, moving and interesting than any perfume in a bottle. True, there are perfumes that surpass the human singing voice in beauty (when the voice in question is Jessica Simpson’s, Taylor Swift’s, or Justin What’s-His-Name’s), but a vocal genius like Holiday can achieve heights of passion no perfume can match. (Perfume has never made me cry.) I didn’t expect the Holiday-inspired fragrance by Serge Lutens, Une Voix Noire (a black voice), to have the impact of the iconic singer.

Who knows what Holiday smelled like? I can only imagine the scents of cigarette smoke, booze, sweat, make-up and perfume that surrounded her in the warm, crowded nightclubs where she often sang. Surely there were flowers in her dressing rooms as well as pinned to her hair. She owned a beloved dog, Mister, who would accompany her to gigs. Not many of these elements, as I imagine them, infuse Une Voix Noire. One can respect that Lutens and his perfumer Christopher Sheldrake avoided the obvious (well, the dog’s not “obvious”…why didn’t they put a little “Mister” in the bottle?) but what they’ve come up with could have been used to represent any number of women in modern times: singers, accountants, even teenage cheerleaders in Dubuque…

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