Jean Patou will launch Joy Forever, a new fragrance for women, in November. Joy Forever is a flanker to 1930’s Joy…
5 perfumes: At the Discounters
Before I collected fragrance, my “hobby” (read: single-minded fixation) was used books. When I first started buying perfume, my husband rather encouraged the interest, because he thought it might distract me from my bibliophilia: he was tired of hauling dozens of very heavy boxes full of my dusty, smelly, fragile purchases each time we moved, and besides, how much perfume could one bluestocking wife buy?1 HA!
We still have many, many books about the apartment, including the out-of-print literary fiction and back issues of The Paris Review of those times. Reading the acknowledgements and writer interviews, I’ve noticed there are some authors so frequently mentioned as “underrated” that it’s a wonder how anyone manages to overlook them. Occasionally one will reach a critical mass of “underratedness” and then a clever publisher will reissue a handsome series of books from his or her back catalog, hopefully while the writer can still enjoy the attention and royalties. Just as I was starting this post2, I found out one of my favorite authors, Evan S. Connell, died in January, in Santa Fe, New Mexico; if you know his work, you’ll join me in a moment of silence for a great literary stylist who long toiled in relative obscurity. Luckily, in recent years Connell had his revival and much of his fiction and non-fiction has been reissued, including a book I think would find an appreciative audience here, The Connoisseur. While I was delighted to see Connell recognized with glossy new editions, there are some books best encountered among the overflowing shelves and random piles of a good used bookstore, and The Connoisseur is one of them. Any fragrance nut will recognize the path to obsession charted by Connell’s recurring protagonist Karl Muhlbach: the chance find of a fascinating thingy, the curious way time and space collapse as the new interest is researched and money is spent, and the hungry and vaguely alarming welcome one is given by more experienced collectors…
Top 10 Fall Fragrances 2011
I always tell people my favorite season is summer. In truth, it’s autumn. I whisper this fact, because while autumn is heartrendingly beautiful with its crisp mornings and warm afternoons and a garden still full of dahlias and greens, autumn is also the harbinger of winter. Each delightful, knife-sharp afternoon is a reminder of the rainy days ahead. Each walk through a shuffle of parchment-red leaves portends months of dark, slushy cold. When I can forget all that and focus on the here and now, I love fall.
For courage, I queued up Ian Bostridge’s sad but glorious Schubert lieder and chose ten autumn situations and matching fragrances to write about for today’s post:
Making the seasonal transition: All of the sudden, a morning feels colder than the rest. Instead of grabbing a cardigan, you ponder a light jacket. You’re almost ready to fire up the furnace for the first time this year, but not quite yet. A warmer fragrance seems fitting, but you’re not quite tempted to give yourself over to heavy gourmands and orientals. Ormonde Jayne Tolu works nicely now. Its green heart lightens its rich, oriental base. Annick Goutal Eau de Charlotte is a good transitional fragrance, too. It is fresh, but offers the after-school treat of bread, jam, and chocolate…
Jean Patou 1000 ~ fragrance review
The drizzly spring afternoon at an antiques mall where I found a bottle of Jean Patou 1000 Eau de Toilette also yielded a 1920s evening coat. The coat is gold lamé, dull and frayed at the cuffs and collar, and is covered with gold and green sequins sewn in the shapes of flowers with twisting stems. Green silk velvet lines the coat’s interior, even down the insides of the sleeves. Sewn in the collar is a label in a Gatsby-esque font that reads “Miss Wilson, 657 Boylston st., Boston.” The coat feels glamorous, mysterious, and decayed. That’s exactly how I feel about Jean Patou 1000.
House nose Jean Kerléo created 1000 (sometimes called “Mille,” the French word for “thousand”). According to the Jean Patou website, the formula took ten years and 1,000 tries to perfect. Kerléo had only worked for Patou for four years when 1000 was released in 1972, so you can take the story with a grain of salt or figure maybe Kerléo picked up on another perfumer’s work when he arrived. For 1000’s launch, Patou delivered by Rolls Royce 1,000 bottles of the fragrance in jewel-encrusted boxes to the “most elegant women in Paris.”
The Patou website calls 1000 a floral chypre…
Midnight in the Bois de Boulogne
It smells like midnight in the Bois de Boulogne — sexy and mysterious. I think it creates a mood. It’s alluring. It says, I’m interested in life, in olfactory senses as well as visual ones.
— Actress Anjelica Huston talks about Jean Patou 1000, in Timeless 1,001 Nights at the New York Times. Many thanks to SuddenlyInexplicably for the link!