I’ve never met perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, but from what I’ve seen, heard and read (interviews, his own books) I like him. I enjoy (and own) many of his perfumes and, like Georgia O’Keeffe, Ellena shows that wrinkles do not tarnish sex appeal or good looks. Best of all, Ellena comes across as unpretentious, sensible, fun.
Enter stage left: Mr. Serious (aka Frédéric Malle).
In Frédéric Malle’s video of the making of Rose & Cuir,* Malle talks of Ellena’s “periods” as a perfumer…
Looking at the string of words “Hiram Green Hyde” — green hide stood out. (Hyde is a unisex leather perfume described as “challenging” by Hiram Green.) Certainly, any perfume with green hide as an inspiration would be a challenge to wear; green hide is the skin right off a newly killed animal, with flesh, blood, hair and fat still clinging to it. I’ve read about green hides while studying indigenous art and leather-tanning techniques of American Indians. I’m happy to say there’s no smell of green hide in Hyde, but it does bring to mind (and nose) scents of Mexico, and another indigenous group: the Aztecs.
Hyde’s short-lived opening isn’t citrus-y, but reminds me of BAND-AID® bandages…
How many leather fragrances do I own? Three. Chanel Cuir de Russie, Robert Piguet Bandit and Frédéric Malle Monsieur. Stand-out leathers are hard to find; many leather fragrances smell so similar.
Cuir de Russie is a perfume version of a sleek, quirky, man-made bibelot (my house is full of these, too; see my current lemming — the eyeball paperweight from L’Objet —below). Bandit is more of a stand-out ‘natural’ object that’s showy and hard to miss: a glossy chunk of red coral, say…or a hot-pink seashell the size of your head, a Haida basket full of aromatic betel nuts from India. Monsieur’s raunch and libertine paunch prompts a “leather” virtual reality experience…
Last week I was reading an article about the definition of “niche” in the ever-changing fragrance market, and I started thinking back to some of the first “niche” perfumes lines I ever encountered — L’Artisan Parfumeur and Annick Goutal, in particular. There were others I never had the chance to try, and some of them are now discontinued (Gobin Daudé!), but once in a while an early niche line makes a re-appearance. Le Jardin Retrouvé, for example, describes itself as “the first ever niche Maison de Parfum, created in 1975 by the renowned perfumer Yuri Gutsatz.” In 2016, Gutsatz’s son and daughter-and-law re-launched the brand with reformulations of seven of its original fragrances.
I’ve had a small stack of Le Jardin Retrouvé’s boxed sample vials on my desk for the past few weeks, and I’ve been shuffling them around like a deck of cards…
In my mind, Mona di Orio has always been associated with quirky — and sometimes outright challenging — fragrances. Mona di Orio Nuit Noire is as dark and animalic a fragrance as I’ve ever smelled. Even the perfume house’s single note fragrances such as Vanille and Cuir focus on those materials’ less obvious aspects.
With Dõjima and Suède de Suède, the house made a conscious decision to satisfy “the demand for more accessible fragrances for those who recently discovered niche” by developing “more accessible fragrances to build a bridge to the more complex creations in our collection.” Lucky for us, both fragrances are still likely to be plenty interesting to experienced perfume lovers…