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

powdery, the odor of "rich old lady" puffed from my skin. It took me a good half-hour figure out what it reminded me of --a drugstore perfume my mom was crazy about in the '70s-- Cachet! (Mom has since moved on to another sharp scent, Estée Lauder's White Linen, the excoriation of which is for another day). The musky tones were mellow instead of sharp and harsh like Cachet's, and there is actually something woody and a bit of a heavy floral added to round it further. There's some chemicals, too, those damned aldehydes again. They show up more in the middle of the wear, after a lot of the musk wears off (about 5 hours later!). Then for about 3 hours I feel like I'm in the middle of a well made, but still very wrong, remake of Chanel #5. (As if the whole universe doesn't have enough #5 knockoffs. Again. Oy.) Imagine you just watched The Godfather, then you watch Godfather II. You wonder if the universe would've been fine with just one or the other...?

However, the rest of the perfume blogosphere is coming all over itself about this scent. They fill comment pages with pap about its exquisite richness, the fineness of its expensive ingredients, they quibble a bit about whether it's a true floral or really a woody chypre. They pooh-pooh any epithet that it's an "old lady" perfume, saying any old lady who'd wear it would be very wise.. Ugh. It's old-fashioned (a perfumery trend in the '70s, when this was invented) in a bad way, it's "big" (popular for perfumes in the '80s) in a bad way, and it's rich (corpulent, ostentatious) in all the wrong ways. It's just another Patou agglomeration of the "costliest" ingredients they could get. Well, someone's got to relieve the burden of all that money from the rich, I suppose. The scent equivalent of a (powerful, heavy, truculent) Rolls-Royce does the job nicely.