Denyse Beaulieu - The Perfume Lover - A Personal Story of Scent

Opium was Yves Saint Laurent’s swan song as ‘the designer who gave power to women’, in the oft-quoted words of his partner, Pierre Bergé. Despite its transgressive allure, it expressed the couturier’s retreat from the Rive Gauche and the liberated Parisiennes he had induced to wear trousers into the exotic, colour-saturated dream worlds he’d been exploring in Marrakech. The woman ‘addicted to Yves Saint Laurent’ embodied by Jerry Hall in the first print ads had dropped the keys to power to lean back languidly on the gold-embroidered cushions of her Chinese den, where she rested after wild nights at Studio 54 or Le Palace. Or was it that, sated by Opium, the supine Amazon had at last shed her need for men in an ultimate declaration of independence?

Breaking away from the real, albeit privileged, world to set off for imaginary lands, couture became a spectacle. Over the following years, its relevance waned; couturiers ceased to dictate styles and so, essentially, became image purveyors driving the sales of cosmetics, perfumes and accessories. The conception of designer fragrances would be taken over by the marketing departments.

The launch of Opium in North America was also a watershed moment in my olfactory life. I’d come back to Canada after my trip to Paris determined to save up enough money to go back to France to study. Over the Christmas holidays, I worked as a gift-wrapper in a high-end Montreal department store, right next to the perfume counter. This was where I contracted a lasting addiction to cashmere – I had to fold those sweaters before wrapping them up – and a Pavlovian loathing for Opium, which the sharp-taloned Hungarian Lisa would spray all day and sell by the gallon to last-minute male shoppers. My stint as a gift-wrapper, which went on for three years, practically vaccinated me against the whole of the Estée Lauder opus up to 1980 and most of the better-selling classics – N°5, Arpège, L’Air du Temps – whose every waft was tainted with Opium. The potent mix clung to my clothes; it became associated with Lisa’s hypnotic sales pitches, my aching feet and another type of ache, for the beautiful things that passed briefly through my hands and that I couldn’t afford. The experience nearly put me off mainstream fragrances altogether, at an age when most teenagers were scrimping to buy their first bottle of Anaïs Anaïs or Cristalle.

Today, standing in the cavernous Sephora flagship store on the Champs-Élysées, buffeted by waddling bum-bagged tourists and fleet young black-clad sales assistants, I wonder how I’d go about choosing my first grown-up perfume. The wall of fragrances must cover the better part of a kilometre; atomizer-wielding demonstrators lie in ambush and avoiding their spritzes requires ninja-like skills. The conversation I had with that glamorous Parisian shop manager back in the late 70s I could never have here. And the fragrances I was offered then, opulent stuff with breasts and hips and a regal stride, gather dust on the bottom shelves, if they’ve survived at all (the original Chloé hasn’t). Teenage girls are the target demographic for practically every mainstream launch; brands fall all over themselves to cater to their tastes. The Max Factor Green Apple that felt like a slap in the face to me has now grown into a fruit basket the size of the Himalaya and spilled out into every shopping mall.

The cheery, unsophisticated berry had been bumping for decades at the door of perfumers’ labs before someone wondered what that squishy noise was, saw a lick of red juice trickle in, opened up and … Ker-plash! The whole crop spilled into the vats. Soon, even legendary perfume houses such as Guerlain were plonking the notes into the mix: perfume had suddenly gone pink. The berry binge introduced within the codes of fine fragrance a type of note that had come up from functional perfumery. It used to be the other way round: if a perfume was popular, functional fragrances copied it in a simpler, cheaper form. This is why many older brands of hairspray smell of Chanel N°5 or L’Air du Temps; why shampoos in the 70s had the green notes made popular by Chanel N°19 or Givenchy III. Why, at least five products in my bathroom smell of L’Eau d’Issey at this very minute. But in the 90s, the notes of functional fragrances started trickling up into fine fragrance with the synthetic musks used in detergents when the public started craving ‘clean’ in a reaction to the over-saturated scents of the 80s. Perhaps not so coincidentally, this happened at a time when detergent companies were busy buying up perfume houses, their executives smoothly segueing from washing powders to fine fragrance. Fruity notes were the second wave in the 90s, a trend for which the American consultant Ann Gottlieb claimed responsibility. When hired by Bath & Body Works, she said, she introduced ‘things that, up until then, women had found almost nauseating. These fruity notes then came into the public domain much more, and people started loving [them].’

OK, so now those of us who still find them nauseating know who to blame for the wall-o-fruit we crash into as soon as we step into the mall. While I can only congratulate Ms Gottlieb on her success and influence, I can’t quite find it in me to be grateful to her. Especially since her claim demonstrates that the trend sprung from massive clobbering rather than public demand. Granted, the public may have a yen for cheerfully regressive, synthetic scents that remind them of boiled sweets or shampoo – familiar and easy to understand in our sound-bite, mouse-click, twittering ADD world. In a way, Love’s Baby Soft is still what little-girl scents are made of; spayed smells for female eunuchs. If I were sixteen today, what would I do? Probably pick the latest from a brand I liked. Empty the bottle. Then switch to something else. Would it even be possible to feel the fierce commitment I felt for the first fragrance I truly made my own?

Of course, it helped that I’d fallen in love.

Onscreen, Fred MacMurray was ringing the doorbell of a Spanish-style Los Angeles house. In a minute, he’d be leering at Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet. In half an hour, they’d be plotting to bump off her husband. I’d seen Double Indemnity before. My eyes wandered from the screen to the silhouettes in the first row, bathed in silvery light. Since Concordia University’s film noir retrospective had begun, I’d been sitting behind them: the tall, quick, witty Michael, slim as a brushstroke of Indian ink in his sharp-shouldered Thierry Mugler suit; Jon, his scruffy friend in the scuffed aviator jacket, with his stubborn jaw, knobby wrists, light-brown curls tumbling on his forehead; Lise, a poised, slant-eyed blonde with a whispery voice, cinched waist and early-60s pumps; and Mimi, a petite, sarcastic brunette with scarlet lips and schoolteacher cat’s-eye glasses. I’d been breathing in the Waft. I couldn’t make out which one of them wore the bitter leather and ashtray fragrance that rose up from the first row they’d commandeered. They all seemed to trail that after-hours cloud. Once, I’d lingered in the auditorium after they’d left – we’d got as far as small nods and half-smiles – and leaned down on the scruffy one’s seat: the still-warm fabric had soaked up the scent. It felt as tough and dark and raspy as Barbara Stanwyck’s voice. I had a crush on all of those kids, but a little bit more on Jon.

‘I don’t need to use up my bottle of Van Cleef. I’ll just sit next to Denyse here.’

Michael plonked himself down on the couch next to me, comically fanning himself with his hands. He was the little gang’s charismatic leader, fuelling our discussion with esoteric references to the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists, Beat poets and Tamla Motown … This was the first time I wore their Van Cleef and though I’d felt a little self-conscious about appropriating the Waft – they did all wear it, boys and girls, as it turned out – I’d pretty much spray-painted myself with it in Jon’s bathroom.