Metamorphoses #2: Black March

by CB I Hate Perfume, 2006

Much has been said about this, or any other, Christopher Brosius scent. That they're unusually evocative, that they don't smell like perfume (duh!) but are more like olfactory art. Black March smells like dirt, specifically classier dirt, otherwise known as humus, and very specifically in the wet spring with green shoots of weeds growing out of it. What it specifically evokes to me is the Dirt flavor jellybeans from Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans. Its scents of humus and young greens makes other perfume bloggers go into flights of purple prose about "Springs From My Childhood", but not me. Springtime where I'm from generally happens in April, the dirt isn't humus, it's clayey-sandy DIRT, and there's a lot more harsh wet wood, more noxious smelling weeds, and at least one dead animal rotting in a ditch somewhere.

Bel Ami

By Hermès, 1986

Bel Ami by Hermès is a black hole cologne, you try to escape from its pull, but ultimately succumb to the stygian Pine-Sol Musk depths, its bug spray-like sillage is the electromagnetic transmission signalling a fresh victim.

This is from the '80s, but smells as harsh as a cheap cologne from the '70s (an old, very cheap one called Archie, whose bottle was a miniature plastic hard hat, comes to mind). When I tried it on my fiancé it reacted as the creators probably intended, his skin swallowed up the scent almost immediately, and curiously, released the faintest whiff of clove. In an hour the piney-bug spray scent appeared, but much weaker and less noxious, it was almost nonexistant in a few hours and disappeared before the end of the day.

Earlier "cologne" was a unisex scent, usually heavy on the citrus, maybe a little something piney but not much. No. 4711 being one of the originals

Patou 1000

By Jean Patou, 1972

Patou 1000 is the sibling of "the world's most expensive perfume", Joy, which I like to call the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes perfume as I've never been able to smell it. Oh, I can perch my nose at the edge of the bottle at the department store, and like a sound beyond the range of human hearing, you know it's there, but you can't hear it, just a fluttering of your eardrums. That's what Joy does to my nose. Something quivers, my body is aware of the presence of something, but I only detect the faintest whiff of something floral, like a sound from a great distance. Perhaps the ingredients are so costly, Patou only uses the tiniest amounts? Is Joy the grand perfumer's response to homeopathy? Is it a colossal corporate ripoff? Most likely. But this is a review of Patou 1000, not Patou Joy.

I put on 3 dabs of this stuff and almost fell over. Strong, musky, very

Chanel #5

I hate Chanel #5.

Yack all you want about its timelessness, its sparkling aldehydes complementing its heavy jasmine, its perfect representation of everything classy. I think it stinks.

Specifically, I think it stinks of a child's inflatable vinyl pool toy that someone spilled cheap fake flowery perfume on and a little nail polish remover. These aldehydes do not "sparkle" as advertised, they smell like what they are, chemicals. The actual real flowery essences are suffocated in the haze of industrial waste that is your sillage. This perfume does not say "Marilyn Monroe", or "New York", or "high class" to me; it shouts the post-war slogan, "Better Living Through Chemistry!"

What's worse, I can't escape it. Knockoff scents appear in every toiletry known to (wo)mankind, usually the ones that are already unwholesomely