In the past, changes were driven by Mother Nature—or accountants. One caused variations in the quality and availability of natural ingredients, the other substituted less costly ones... In recent years, there’s been a third force: industry efforts to cut back on allergy-causing ingredients, to avoid labelling requirements or outright ingredient bans.
— Kim Pittaway, writing in This ain’t my mama’s L’Air Du Temps at Maclean's.
Sometime in the late-1920s, Bourjois executives sat in an office building in Manhattan and plotted how to conquer the American market. Bourjois was mostly known for its lipsticks and powders, but it had had some success in France with Mon Parfum in 1923. Bourjois was owned then, as it is now, by the Wertheimer family, which also owned Chanel.
In my mind’s eye, it was a warm day, and the rumble of traffic competed with fans whirring in the corner of the office. The visiting French executives bemoaned the bottle of chilled white wine they would have had at lunch had it not been Prohibition. “Coty has a stranglehold on lipstick in this country. Let’s try a fragrance,” one of them said. “We can get Chanel’s perfumer to do something for us, but nothing as upscale as No. 5. We want something friendlier, something that will appeal to the businessman’s wife in Iowa, or even to Margaret.”
Margaret was the stenographer…
Setting: A crowded perfume cabinet in the Pacific Northwest.
Main Characters:
Monsieur Balmain (“Monsieur”): the original Pierre Balmain fragrance for men;
Monsieur Balmain (“MB”): the reformulated version of Monsieur Balmain.
Monsieur “awakes” and is startled to see a new, bright yellow bottle standing next to him on the perfume shelf.
Monsieur: Excusez-moi monsieur, we have not been introduced. Could you turn just a bit…. What? Is this a joke? MY name is Monsieur Balmain, yet “Monsieur Balmain” is written on your garish bottle…
Just when I was worried spring would never arrive, we are having a gorgeous, sunny day, almost warm enough for shorts. To celebrate, I am wearing Balmain’s Vent Vert, the classic green floral fragrance created by Germaine Cellier and released in 1947. Like just about everything else, this was “reworked” to appeal to modern sensibilities; the reformulation was done by perfumer Calice Becker, and I believe the relaunch was in 1990. The notes for the new version are greens, orange blossom, lemon, lime, basil, rose, galbanum, lily of the valley, freesia, hyacinth, tagetes, ylang-ylang, violet, oakmoss, sandalwood, sage, iris, amber, and musk.
Vent Vert starts out a strong, bitter, slightly perfume-y green. After a few minutes the bitterness calms and the citrus notes and orange blossom take the stage, later still, the citrus notes are replaced by the other florals…