Youth Dew - my childhood perfume memory

Youth Dew by Estee Lauder. Misnamed?

There are some scents that have been so popular for so long, that they must surely provoke Proustian memories by the thousand. This is a tale of one of those perfumes.

A couple of months ago I found an almost empty bottle of Youth Dew on my gatepost. It was almost as if I'd attached a sign to announce 'perfume fanatic, this way'. The real reason was that the council's recycling department had left it on the pavement, and a neighbour had tidied it a bit.

It got me thinking. Did I know what it smelled like? Well, no. So while I was stuck in Heathrow - again - I remembered the curious incident of the scent on the gatepost and gave it a sniff. And that's where it got even more curious.

In the back of my olfactory memory I'd stored my evidence in what perfume smells like. A favourite aunt and a glamorous neighbour who worked in the local department store's beauty counter were the only people I knew who wore perfume all the time. So I'd learned early that perfume has one definitive scent; that all others - no matter how beautiful - seemed like mere variations. 

I own over 300 bottles now, including classics that existed long before Youth Dew was blended and bottled. But Youth Dew is that scent. Not Chanel No 5.0, not Mitsouko, not Miss Dior. This one. That's my childhood memory of perfume.

So instead of flowers defining my baseline, I had spiced powder. The name and the scent have a dissonance, don't you think? Youth Dew seems innocuous and light. But this smell is darkly seductive, polished, structured and groomed. This scent wears a corset and plucks its eyebrows. But perhaps it forgets to wash the dishes. It's Joan in Mad Men. Roger might buy her Chanel No 5 to impress her, but she buys this for herself. And she can happily go into a carpeted department store and ask a patronising assistant for a bottle of Youth Dew without anyone raising their eyebrows. Perhaps that was its secret.

Youth Dew dates from an era when the smell was the reason women chose a signature scent. Forget the name, the box and the advertising, and go smell it. Observe the sensually slim ballgown bottle though, and when it's empty put it on a gatepost one day.

Stuck in Heathrow T4

So what do you do in Terminal 4 for three hours?

You can get a bit of exercise, walking from one end to the other, you can get a decent coffee, a smoothie and a wrap. You can catch up on your sniffing, which is what I did when fog struck The Netherlands and left a planeload of us wandering aimlessly in the air conditioned time warp that departure lounges become when you're not sure you're going to be allowed out.

T4 used to be the cool trendy one; now it's Terminal 5's dowdy cousin. 

All the same it's got its own Jo Malone, which was drenched in their pink rose that's raising money for their breast cancer charity. And naturally, there's a massive duty free palace with testers and smelting strips for your olfactory needs.

It was quiet. A Burmese women showed me all around Estee Lauder's collection, and we had a chat about whether she'd be able to visit her family soon, now her home is opening up again.  I was put off Beautiful some years ago as a gobby, arrogant, loud, rude distant relative wears it. When she announced that she always wore it, I was tempted to ask when she thought it might start working... I resisted. Anyway, a guided refresher in White Linen, Youth Dew and the rest was rather handy.

Then on to the new stuff. 

YSL's Manifesto was curiously familiar, but so many of them are. It's hard to be groundbreaking when you've got a bundle of launches every year, I imagine. But the reason this one smelled like something I know was that it smells like Says Alice, a special edition one of Mr C's cousin's commissioned for his sister's 21st. A coincidence.

So I headed for the men's section and Thierry Mugler's collection of tactile testers. It's right at the back. Just keep walking. I tried and loved the leather one and the Havana one, sweet tangy tobacco. I don't hold with this men/women/unisex breakdown. Thee agree some men's scents I'd never wear but that's not because they're for men, it's because they're god awful. This one is gorgeous and affordable. Bless them and their idiosyncrasies in a bland market. Go try and buy.

And next time you're stuck in T4, head to the back of duty free and sniff out some rarities.

Aeroplane, from Detaille, Paris perfumer

I almost don't want to tell you about Detaille. It's my favourite secret French perfumer, going since 1905 in the same shop, selling beautiful scents and skincare.
But I will. Because I'm kind.
It's not so secret that it hides from the world. Their website  - detaille.com - used to be in the most idiotically charming English, tranlsated word for word from the French.

Here's an example, describing one of their men's fragrances, which I wear a lot - but Mr C wears more often:

Aéroplane

Cyprus Citrus

A few fresh touches where lemon, bergamot and petit grain prevail, an aromatic touch of basil and mint on a chypre background, an elegant wake of patchouli and oak moss.

Isn't that lovely? They don't realise that the English perfume community translates 'chypre' into 'chypre', not Cyprus, and that we keep the word 'sillage' instead of wake. The packaging has the original 1920s illustrations, and the bottles look as if they've not changed since their art deco design. As for the scents, I'd say that they're timeless. Aeroplace is like all the best of all the citrus chypres - Eau de Lancome, Trophee Lancome, Eau de Rochas and Eau Sauvage - rolled into one but stronger.

 

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.

Shake or Shape?

The more I learn about perfumery, the more intriguing the shape/vibration argument becomes. Recently I read (in the wrong order) Luca Turin's book about his research process, The Secret of Scent, then Avery Gilbert's What the Nose Knows, then Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent, about Luca Turin's quest to identify the mechanism that our bodies use to identify scent.

After following the arguments for and against molecular shape and molecular vibration, I had to come down on the side of vibration. But then I needed to know why the perfume industry, Avery Gilbert and many biologists are so dead set against it, so over the Christmas holidays I downloaded and read Luca Turin's original academic paper: A Spectroscopic Mechanism for Primary Olfactory Reception. It's not exactly poolside reading, but it's not impossible to understand. It's objective, and as well as describing his methods in uncovering a valid mechanism for the human nervous system to detect smells by their vibration, he also gives a new scientific explanation for the anomalies which scuppered the previous vibration theories by Dyson and Wright: how two molecules that have the same vibration (the right hand and left hand versions of the same compound) smell different.

His theory explains why molecules with completely different shapes can smell the same. Turin goes further and shows that two molecules with the same shape can smell different (because they have a two different ions captured inside them). That ought to be good enough to get it a fair hearing, so how come the people on the opposing bench claim that they refuse to read Turin's paper because it's a waste of time? (Read The Emperor of Scent for the whole story and see Avery Gilbert's blog for the way he writes about anyone who explores Turin's theory further.)

The difference between a true scientific theory - not just a good idea, the way we use the word theory in everyday life - is that it should be able to predict the outcome of an experiment.
Turin's vibrational theory basically says this:
If two molecules have a similar vibration, they will have a smiliar smell.

The shape explanation says that each scent molecule corresponds exactly to a receptor which it fits into perfectly. It's known as the lock and key method.

The shape explanation can't predict what something will smell like. Molecules with similar shapes can smell completely different, or not smell at all. It seems pretty obvious to someone coming to this from a scientific background, but from outside the circle of the modern perfumery industry, that the shape theory is rubbish. It doens't work, and it doesn't help to make new scents, but it's the one that the scent chemists have invested in.

I read a lot of books about perfume. Jean-Claude Ellena's little gem, Perfume, the Alchemy of Scent, dances round the round the issue by using phrases artistic rather than scientific. For Ellena, the scent molecule expresses itself to the nervous system. Roja Dove never strays from the industry line: it's the shape that does it. For him, a scent molecule searches for the right receptor them fits into it, the lock and key method.

The lock and key method does exist in nature, in our immune system, but it's not instant. Smell is. Our eyes and ears both use vibrations to explain what we hear and see. You'd have thought it was worth an investigation.

So what's the big problem? As Chandler Burr explains in The Emperor of Scent, and Luca Turin also spells out point by point in The Secret of Scent, the entire multi-million pound perfume industry relies on five (six at the time they were writing) massive companies which pretty much own the world of smell.

They make their multi-millions by creating thousands of new molecules (mostly from oxygen, carbon and hydrogen) aiming to invent and patent one that smells 1) great  and 2) strong and is safe and stable enough to be used in a brand new fragrance. They aim to impress the top perfumers (the noses, creative directors and the marketing teams) and sell this molecule to one of the huge perfume houses that dominate the world's markets. It could be used for luxury perfumery, or for washing powder, room fragrances or soap - anything that smells good.
Of the thousands that they make each year, most don't make the grade. Only about 1% of their research chemists' results will be useful. That's 99% of their work down the plughole. That's the way research goes.
But if they chose to apply Luca Turin's theory, and aimed to create molecules with similar vibrations to sandalwood, jasmine, rose and all the really expensive natural stuff, which was what he recommended, he suggested that they could maybe save 90% of their costs. So why don't they? Why is the vibration theory stamped on so hard whenever it's mentioned? Chandler Burr's explanation is that the people who really do understand Turin's method, CHYPRE (CHaracter PREdiction (he has a sense of humour)), realise that 90% of them would lose their jobs if it were adopted so they denounce it as ridiculous.

Luca Turin appears to be entirely unmotivated by money; he is besotted with scent and he adores pure science. He's also defiantly anti-political, in the sense that he doesn't really care about his career or status in the academic world as long as he has a lab and access to research facilities. He has also crossed scientific discliplines to get to his result, something that hasn't been popular in the last 100 years since science split up into specialisms. He's technically a biophysicist, but he had to delve into chemistry, physics and biology to get the answers he needed. While the chemists say that his chemistry is valid, and likewise with the physicists and biologists, if a scientist sticks his or head up and says "Isn't this worth a further look?" they risk being shot at from all directions.

This isn't a new situation. Even Einstein had one theory that no-one believed until after his death. Centuries ago, scientists who dared to suggest something that disagreed with the powers that be risked burning at the stake. It was obvious that the sun orbited the earth, wasn't it? You could see it happening. Fortunately for Turin, you don't get shoved in the slammer for your theories these days, but the verbal abuse he's had is a wonder to behold.

Now, he's working on scent research for the US military, the organisation that funded the internet. Isn't that a bit of a hint that he might actually be right?

Burgins. The best reason to visit York

Go to York.
It's a beautiful place, with its Minster (not a cathedral because it was built by public subscription), Betty's tea rooms, the medieval walls, tiny cobbled streets to get lost in, the National Railway Museum, river boats, and Burgins Perfumery. It's at 2 Coney Street, YO1 9NA.

In York, I generally arrive at the station, get on a bus, visit my mother, get on another bus and go home. Yesterday it was sunny and I decided to walk to the town centre, find something to eat, then take the bus from further along its route. On the way, I spotted a shop I'd only ever seen when it was closed, a small Victorian perfumery with a huge range of scents. Yesterday I was there during opening hours and in the window was a bottle of Ma Griffe reduced from £70 to £22. (It was still in its box of course.) I'm not a huge fan of Ma Griffe, but as I didn't have any and as it's one of those your really ought to have in the collection, in I went.

It's November. They have the new releases that you'll read about in Grazia, and the Christmas gift boxes, but on their beautiful, original wooden shelves they've carefully arranged a huge, floor to ceiling range of classic scents. They have perfumes that most department stores don't bother with because they aren't all the rage: Chanel Cristalle, the more obscure Guerlain masterpieces, Dior gems from the 50s, 60s and 70s (the modern versions, not the originals to be fair). They don't have Lancome. "Department stores" said my chap. Perhaps L'Oreal, their owners, don't bother to supply independents. Stuff L'Oreal; they're missing a trick. There was an abundance of masterpieces at Burgins to satisfy my olfactory desires.
I left with Poison, the original, not one of new watered down versions, ("Courageous," commented the helpful, professional and completely un-judgemental chap who was serving me. Mr Burgin perhaps? I promised not to wear it outdoors.) I took one of the bottles of Ma Griffe; there's one more at £22 for the person who gets there first. I also wandered away with a 50ml Miss Dior, and Tocade by Rochas, one which Luca Turin praises to the skies and which I'd never smelled before. Stunning stuff.

So today I'm wearing Miss Dior. Burgins of York (and my mother) can expect frequent visits.

Sea Salt

I've bumped into two different sea salts recently. One is a clothing shop in Cornwall named in English: Sea Salt. It sells organic cotton things with stripes, canvas bags and coats to keep the wind out. Just right for a British summer holiday.
The other - which goes perfectly with the clothing - is Sel Marin, French for sea salt of course by Heeley. Put on your stripy top and matching stripy socks, and perhaps add an elegant stripy cotton hair band, then you're ready for a spritz of the sea.
I've been searching for the right seaside scent. It's something to do with being brought up by a beach, but the smell of wet sand and seaweed evokes limitless freedom. It's not much to do with sunshine, more with waves splashing high against sea walls, fast-moving clouds and boats bobbing up and down in the distance. Northern European sea salt.

James Heeley kindly lists his notes: Lemon, Italian Bergamot, Beech Leaf, Sea Salt, Moss, Algae, Cedar and Musc. He also talks about sunshine, but I think his inspiration is the same as my impressions. Yorkshire beaches.Summer holidays in Scarborough, Saltburn, Whitby and Bridlington.

L'Artisan Parfumeur's Cote D'Amour is a seaside scent, but it's for people with yachts and loafers. Frederic Malle's Dans tes Bras reminds me of the end of a long long day at the beach. Sel Marin is the scent of the seaside first thing in the morning, for people with picnics, windbreakers and plastic buckets and spades. I love it.