Hey one of our favorite blog friends posted this yesterday here at Trooper York:
Palladian said...
Am I allowed to move in over here?
Am I allowed to move in over here?
Absolutely my friend. This blog is definitely in need of a curmudgeon. Welcome. I know you think we have a lot of sports and bodacious ta-ta's but we are nothing if not user friendly. So I will be incorporating a lot of artsy fartsy stuff and we are even going to through in a few polls that will be Palladian friendly. Cause we know Palladian loves a good poll in the right place. So to speak.
Our next poll will: What's your favorite Cologne. I have several candidates lined up:
Hai Karate
Old Spice
Axe
Magnum
Old Mr. Boston
Anyway I will be happy to use your expertise to add or alter the list.
After we decide what's your favorite pasta.
22 comments:
LOL. Palladian, I'm guessing, is going to love this list of colognes.
Gonna have to go with Old Spit when that poll rolls around.
Hey they are manly colognes, but women like them too!
Well if you get them drunk enough. That was always my plan anyway.
Hey they are manly colognes, but women like them too!
Stud Cologne.
Thanks, Trooper. It's funny that the word "cologne" has evolved to mean "perfume for men". "Cologne" was one of the first alcohol-based fragrances, Eau De Cologne, so named because it allegedly originated in Cologne Germany. Eau de Cologne was worn by both men and women, as indeed were most fragrances up until the 1930s, in the sense that there was no specific "men's" fragrances marketed until 1934's "Pour Un Homme" composed by Ernest Daltroff, the genius perfumer behind the classic French perfume house Caron. Of course the majority of perfumes produced in the 20th century were composed and marketed for women, but it was never explicitly stated before as it was with "Pour Un Homme" (For A Man). Some of the great classic early modern perfumes, such as Guerlain's "Jicky", Houbigant's "Fougère Royale" and Coty's "Chypre" were ambiguously gendered creatures as well as being absolute, genre-defining masterpieces.
In fact, many men's fragrances today descend from "Fougère Royale" (Royal Fern) which was composed in 1881. I have 2 bottles of it from the very early 20th century and in them you can smell the basis of the genre: an accord between a lavender material or materials and coumarin (1-benzopyran-2-one to you chemists). This was added to and manipulated to make a zillion variations and very few fougères today are simple enough to glimpse the purity of the original. About the only two I can think of are Dana's "Canoe" and "Brut", but both of those smell cheap, without the richness of the ancient "Fougère Royale". Brut used to be a lot better but unfortunately some key ingredients (nitromusks) were removed in the 80s or 90s because they made some European bureaucrats develop a mild rash or something. There's no good replacement for the nitromusks (one of which, musk ketone, smells as much like natural animal-sourced musk as any other single-moleculed material) so of course Brut today smells truncated, as do a lot of other classic perfumes.
Another great, hairy shirtless fougère fragrance is "Azzaro pour Homme", an "aromatic" variation of the basic accord, which makes it spicier and complex. It's still wonderful, but definitely for a certain kind of man.
"Old Spice" was originally a women's perfume called "Early American Old Spice" made by the Shulton company, a purely American invention. This was a big flop and so it was given hormones which caused it to grow a mustache and become the classic "Old Spice". Sadly, this great scent has lost a bit of its oomph from facelifts and nanny-state interventions and cheapness. I have a bottle from the 50s and it smells fabulous, just like my grandfather. It's the same basic bottle of today, except better-made opaline glass with some ships printed on the side in blue. The stopper is a cork with a lead (!!!) cap that's the originator of the little plug on the bottle today.
"Stetson" is also surprisingly good, if a little cheap smelling (well, it's cheap!). Some perfume journalist friends of mine made the amazing discovery that "Stetson" is basically the same as Estée Lauder’s "Youth Dew" except with pictures of cowboys on the box. Smell them both... it's hilarious.
I also think it's perfectly acceptable for men to wear "women's" fragrances and vice-versa. For instance some of my favorite fragrances to wear are marketed as "women's perfumes" : Guerlain's "Mitsouko", Dior's "Diorella", the aforementioned "Jicky". The right man in the right situation could even get away wearing "Angel".
Dior's "Eau Sauvage" is a great masculine, composed by one of the greatest perfumers who ever lived, Edmond Roudnitska (he composed "Diorissimo", Rochas "Femme" among others). If you like it, "Diorella" is an even better variant on the theme. Hide the bottle if you're embarrassed to be wearing a "women's perfume", don't put on too much and people will compliment you.
The aforementioned "Pour un Homme" by Caron is a great one too, a rich but simple combination of lavender and ambery vanilla notes. Sadly its producer, the once-great Caron has changed hands a few times and has basically destroyed most of their classic perfumes through incompetent reformulation in the service of cheapness. Perhaps they spared "Pour un Homme" from the carnage. It's a great, and manages to smell like you just put it on after a close morning shave for hours.
Other fragrances for men that I recommend but don't have time to write about in depth: Chanel's "Pour Monsieur"; Guerlain's "Habit Rouge" and "Vetiver"; on the citric side of things, Guerlain's "Eau de Guerlain" and Balmain's "Eau de Monsieur Balmain"; Davidoff's "Cool Water" is very good but it is harmed by its association with its millions of terrible, cheap, offensive clones and the sleazeballs who wear them. "Azzaro Pour Homme" also shares this affliction, but not as much as "Cool Water" since most of the sleazeballs who wore Azzaro with gold chains and banlon shirts back in the day are dead.
My other general advice for men regarding perfumes: don't wear too much of anything, don't try to be something you're not, and do not buy or wear anything whose name contains the words "energy", "xtreme", "blue", "sport", "turbo", or "fresh"
Wow. That was seriously interesting, and something about which, I admit, I am very ignorant.
As Trooper says, things go better if we stick to things we know something about.
Wanna hear about 17th century keyboard temperaments?
I can almost hear the eyes snapping shut right now.
an accord between a lavender material or materials and coumarin (1-benzopyran-2-one to you chemists).
How odd that I (as a chemist) recognize courmarin as an anti-coagulant and as an organic dye, but never appreciated that it had a pleasant odor.
You learn something from Palladian everyday.
"Wanna hear about 17th century keyboard temperaments?
I can almost hear the eyes snapping shut right now."
Not mine! I'm a huge "authentic performance" freak. I don't mind "inauthentic performances" either, but I do love period instruments and tunings.
I'm actually listening to a recording someone recently gave me of John Kitchen playing keyboard instruments from the Raymond Russell Collection as we speak (type).
Hahaha, I dig some 1600-ish keyboard action, some ten-fingered harpsichord type action. But 10 fingers on your harpsichord or tu lips on my organ? Who can choose.
I have a question for Palladian or for anyone who might know about these matters: are perfumes, men's and women's, intended to both mimic and enhance/intensify the natural male or female odor; or is the point to make a man or a woman smell like a rose or an orange or a lilac bush or grass after rain? Or do they employ both strategies? Is there a hierarchy of perfumes not so much in terms of quality as in terms of strategy? I don't know what I'm talking about but the questions are sincere.
When I was with the Pats, I notice Tom Brady doesn't need cologne to score big with the babes.
'Sant, Tom sez, my motto is- if they'll fuck you clean they'll fuck you dirty.
Drew Bledsoe used a cologne we called Eau de Franklin, if you know what I mean.
"I have a question for Palladian or for anyone who might know about these matters: are perfumes, men's and women's, intended to both mimic and enhance/intensify the natural male or female odor"
Not good perfume.
"...or is the point to make a man or a woman smell like a rose or an orange or a lilac bush or grass after rain?"
I'm not fond of the imitative style of perfume. I don't think people should smell like lilac bushes.
"Or do they employ both strategies?"
Well, that's where it gets interesting. I think the best perfume is abstraction. This where stops being perfume and becomes art. The greatest perfumes are almost all abstract perfumes. They don't smell like one particular thing. They lean in one direction or the other or the other and in the process acquire a beauty that surpasses the sum of its parts. Its kind of how the best poetry is ostensibly about a subject, but transcends that subject through the careful use of words and meter to create something greater than its immediate subject. Smell "Chanel No. 5" or "Mitsouko" or "Angel" or "Shalimar". You can detect a lot of the component parts but the overall face of each of those perfumes is otherworldly and strange... abstraction... art. They don't smell like jasmine or rose or lemon peel or cedar. They smell like themselves.
"Is there a hierarchy of perfumes not so much in terms of quality as in terms of strategy?"
Hmm. Well, the majority of perfume is crap made to sell with a minimal outlay of expense at maximum profit. I would say in general perfumes that purport to "do" something, like attract women or men or whatever, are the lowest of the low. No perfume or cologne or fragrance can attract a woman or a man. That's the job of the wearer. The fragrance is a (hopefully) pretty bonus.
And don't fall for the "pheromone" nonsense. Human noses cannot (as far as we know) detect pheromones. Perfumes shouldn't be utilitarian. They should be about beauty. If you like the scent, wear it. That's all the reason you need. People who wear the scent that they actually like are usually much more attractive. A perfume can certainly hint at sex and bad intentions through the use of certain materials, but that's art not biology, in the same way that a beautiful painting of a nude can hint at such things, but in the end it's just paint on a surface. The sex is in your associations.
"'Sant, Tom sez, my motto is- if they'll fuck you clean they'll fuck you dirty."
Exactly right. As I said, the fragrance is (hopefully) an enjoyable bonus.
I forgot to mention YSL "Kouros". The best take on this is from my friends Tania Sanchez and Luca Turin's book Perfumes: The Guide:
Twenty-seven years after its release, the structure of Kouros is still so novel, so immediately recognizable and so impossible to imitate that it is probably a sporadic case in perfumery. It smells like the tanned skin of a guy with gomina in his hair stepping out of the shower wearing a pre- WWI British dandified fragrance: citrus, flowers, musk. It has that faintly repellent clean-dirty feel of other people’s bathrooms, and manages to smell at once scrubbed and promissory of an unmade bed. The fact that all these images are conjured up by a fragrance in itself so consummately abstract is a testimony to the brilliance of its creator, Pierre Bourdon. Such things happen not by accident but only as the work of genius.
"How odd that I (as a chemist) recognize courmarin as an anti-coagulant and as an organic dye, but never appreciated that it had a pleasant odor."
A lot of the basic old perfumery materials came from the 19th century experiments with dyes. Coumarin occurs naturally, most notably in the seed of Dipteryx odorata, the so-called tonka bean. They're illegal to use in food in the USA but they're used in that context elsewhere. To me coumarin (and the tonka bean) has a vaguely poisonous smell, a little like vanilla-scented bug spray. That is what makes it such a useful perfumery material. Sadly it's being restricted out of perfumery in the EU and, in our Hopeful and Changed age, probably soon here too. Progressives hate perfume. It smacks a bit too much of pleasure.
By the way, eau de cologne, eau de toilette, eau de parfum and parfum all relate to the concentration of the fragrance, in ascending order. Eau de cologne contains a small portion of fragrance concentrate (usually less than 5%) and a large portion of alcohol and water. Parfum, or extrait, or perfume has the highest concentration of the fragrance concentrate, anywhere from 15 to about 30%, usually around 20%.
Most men's fragrances are actually eau de toilette.
From your wiki link: The biosynthesis of coumarin in plants is via hydroxylation, glycolysis and cyclization of cinnamic acid.
I used to work with cinnamic acid. As the name suggests, it was good smelling stuff.
The science of smell, osmology, is seriously fascinating.
Eau de cologne contains a small portion of fragrance concentrate (usually less than 5%) and a large portion of alcohol and water.
I worked at downtown grocery store in Madison during college. The drunks used to come in every night after bartime and try to steal all the vanilla and anise extracts.
"I used to work with cinnamic acid. As the name suggests, it was good smelling stuff."
Yes, and it's the precursor of a lot of very commonly used perfumery materials, like cinnamaldehyde and all of its derivatives (α amyl, α hexyl, α methyl etc)
"The science of smell, osmology, is seriously fascinating."
I'm good friends with the biophysicist Luca Turin who's quite well-known in the field.
"I worked at downtown grocery store in Madison during college. The drunks used to come in every night after bartime and try to steal all the vanilla and anise extracts."
The precursor of "eau de Cologne" was drinkable as well as wearable.
Hopeless drunks in Russia drank what I'm told was called odekolon for years.
I'm good friends with the biophysicist Luca Turin who's quite well-known in the field.
Absolutely fascinating. Deuterium isotope effects and vibrational spectroscopy used to be very near and dear to me.
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