Chantilly Cream

I went to Chantilly chateau in the 70s, when I was town twinned with a French girl who lived in the Paris banlieu of Epinay-sur Seine when it was quite posh. What I remembered most was the huge carp in the chateau lake, which would attack a baguette like a shoal of piranhas, but with more sucking and less biting.
My grandmother pronounced it shan-tillee, and it turned out she'd been there for the horse racing.

At Chantilly, you have the horse racing, a chateau, cream and lace. The French call whipped cream Chantilly (pronounced more like shor-tee-yee), but they stick a load of sugar in it and make it taste like the stuff that comes in squirty tubes. I haven't been there for decades, but when I visited every shop sold the handmade lace at imaginative prices.

And then there's the scent.
I've been snapping up the occasional bottle of vintage scent on eBay and Etsy. I admit it. If you've been bidding for something interesting in the past couple of weeks, that was probably me putting the price up. My first bottle of Chantilly - the real stuff from Houbigant not the current replacement from Dana - came from Etsy. I wasn't expecting much. Which is why I was blown away by its beauty when I unwrapped the cellophane from my 1950s boxed set. I got dusting powder thrown in.

It smells of creme Chantilly whipped up with strawberries, floated on top of champagne that you sip with a lipstick lick of the lips, then dusted smoothly with velvety face powder. I can tell you this now, because I have recently secured enough of the stuff to last me a lifetime (if I'm not too lavish). I didn't want you all bidding against me.  That's what it's like on me. It smells quite faint, light and insignificant on my friend Sonja. She has a theory about perfume for blondes; Chantilly is a dark-haired fragrance.

But what of Houbigant, who created Chantilly in 1941? They are selling a couple of expensive scents at posh shops around the globe. Their history is impeccable, except for a few incidents with their royal customers' bodies becoming detached from their heads. They were one of Queen Victoria's perfumers. They invented fougere. They have a strange monochrome website which looks like wallpaper from Versailles, in the dark.

Modern Chantilly is made by Dana; they have two websites, one is American and one is written in excrutiatingly bad English, Do go there for the fun of it, but don't buy anything. danaperfumes.org They write things like this:
"Chantilly Dana perfumes is a classic that is feminine and charming, containing Chypre Oriental. Chypre Oriental is an Oriental classic fragrance which is a blend of different extracts such as rose, jasmine and other plants that you can only find in the Oriental places."
"There are various types of Love’s Dana perfumes and one of them is the Rainforest. This is ideal for those who are environmentally conscious, since it has a clean and natural scent."
"The last product from Dana perfumes for men is No Limit, a scent that goes off to those who are competitive, with only the word win in their minds."

I rest my case, m'Lud.


Their Chantilly is not the same, although they are using bottles that look just like the vintage ones so beware if you're buying it at boot sales or online. When did Chantilly jump ship? What happened between its disappearance as a blossoming, lingering, soul stirring scent and its reappearance as a ghost that's now haunting US drugstores. Don't know. Wikipedia won't tell me.

It's not modern. Is that a bad thing? I think not, but then I span several decades myself. My nephew recently asked me if I'd heard of Led Zeppelin. As the only one among his friends who's listened to Stairway to Heaven, he thought he'd discovered them.
Perhaps there's a whole new generation who would love a flouncy fragrance that makes an entrance in high heels and a hat. Let's hear it for Chantilly. Now get online and hunt it down.

Paris, with a cold

Last week I fulfilled a kind invitation to speak at the in-Cosmetics marketing trends conference in Paris. It's held in a theatre attached to hall 7.3 of the Paris Expo, a huge complex with its own moving walkway that rolls right under the Peripherique (although the concrete is painted white so most people are hardly aware that it's not just some ceiling).
I strolled around the exhibition - which some women managed to do in four inch heels, probably the French - and saw materials from natural rainforest butters to new molecules displayed for the amusement and attraction of the creators of cosmetics. When the buyer from Estee Lauder walked on to a perfume supplier's stand, they almost fell to their knees in awe and delight. I melted away.

In normal circumstances I would have taken an extra day to visit perfumeries, however, I had a dreadful cold. One company kindly gave me a handful of Fair Trade menthol crystals extracted from organic mint grown in India. I sniffed at it deeply. "Crystal menth" quipped one of my Facebook friends. So instead I went to look at the perfumerie at Le Bon Marche, just to see what was new. This cathedral of cosmetics is owned by LVMH, who graciously allow some of their rivals to sell their wares (probably to see how well the competition fares on a level, luxuriously furnished, playing field). For the first time I felt excluded by its crystalline, cool, geometric structure (the bottom left corner of the picture above). It is designed to welcome those in search of scent, to make them feel at home, comfortable and indulged. Instead they find salespeople gossiping amongst themselves, and marooned middle aged gentlemen sinking into the soft leather sofas, looking glazed and wondering how long it will take for their wives to return from the handbag department.

In the stationery department, where I went to buy sellotape, the over-groomed sales women were having a chat while they rang up my purchase. The lady behind me in the queue and I exchanged a mere raised eyebrow while she waited for one of them to open the second till. But no.

There was a new installation, half fashion, half art, featuring Doc Marten's among other iconic designers. The four young, beautiful sales people stood in the centre crossroads talking, and caused an obstruction for those of us what wanted to look at the display.

Back down the beautiful criss-cross escalators (as shown above). I was tempted to buy the special Miller Harris perfume created just for Le Bon Marche. What I could smell of it, I liked. My sense of smell hadn't disappeared, it was merely dampened. But I couldn't bring myself to attempt to engage these people in conversation. I can get by in French, enough for the average Parisian to tolerate my attempt. But why should it be such an struggle?

Next door in Le Grand Epicerie de Paris, the food shop to end all food shops, Le Bon Marche's grocery, the lady on the till was a complete delight. So no more perfume or posh sellotape for me, my lads. But I might go back there for my Ovomaltine biscuits.