SMOKE SIGNALS
Wafts of oud, amber and incense stir fond memories of autumnal pleasures past
Hannah Betts savours autumn’s most evocative, smouldering scents
Iam an autumnal being. June bustin’ out all over does nothing for me. Come the balmy days of August, I can be found fantasising about velvet, cashmere and fur, willing not an Indian summer, but that first crisp catch within the air and the falling of leaves. For November brings the scent of bonfires – at home and at large: the cosy domestic hearth, the soothing smoulder of burning leaves and the heady rush of cordite.
All fragrance started in smoke, as the name suggests: per fumum meaning ‘through smoke’, an offering of incense shooting straight to the gods. When we veil ourselves in smoky vapours, we engage with perfume’s very essence, as something immanent, sublime.
Perfumers deploy myriad sleight-of-hand techniques to create smokiness, using resins such as labdanum and opoponax, and the potent, earthy fixative isobutyl quinoline. As a consequence, smoke scents also encompass wood, moss, tobacco, oud, leather, incense, balsams, patchouli, vetiver and the tang of hungry flames. This lends them a thrillingly ambiguous aspect: on the one hand, they convey the ancient sanctuary of the fireplace; on the other, danger, sex and death.
For smoke proper, Miller Harris’ La Fumée Intense encapsulates the per fumum heritage: spicy and resinous in its mystical ascent. Serge Lutens’ headily voluptuous Ambre Sultan is justly notorious: a raw, vegetal amber that is the smell of the souk; spiritual, while beguilingly illicit.
The sandalwood temple offerings in Diptyque’s Tam Dao transport us to the holy forests of north Vietnam. Bangkok’s Pryn Parfum boasts Morah (named after a femme fatale of Thai folklore), an intoxicating fusion of exotic flowers, dense spice, aromatic champaca leaf and opium. Nasomatto’s Nudiflorum is a jasmine in which the flower becomes almost unrecognisably soft and loamy with a sweet smokiness – and an extraordinarily enduring quality.
Armani Privé’s Bois d’Encens situates us firmly within the Catholic church. As with true faith, it has a disarming simplicity: two types of incense plus schinus molle (a kind of pepper-tree), cedar and vetiver. It is stark, raw, profound. The same cannot be said of Etat Libre d’Orange’s Rien, one of perfume’s great misnomers, in which nothingness is a front for everything. Incense blends with rose petals, leather and patchouli to yield a heady exoticism, the plush depths of its base notes issuing from amber, black pepper and opium. It mesmerises all; Rien Intense still more so.
Oud, resin from fragrant agarwood, flourishes in Middle Eastern perfumes but can fail to take flight in Western scents. Not so in the case of Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle’s resplendent Dawn by Carlos Benaïm. Inspired by the energy of the first light of day – slow and steady as the beat of a coming drum – this is a magnificent, transcendent perfume.
Creed’s Royal Oud has a clean, almost astringent quality that those repelled by oud’s feral aspect will enjoy; ditto Gucci Guilty Oud, which has a blackberry fruitiness that eliminates any elements of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’. By Terry’s Terryfic Oud L’Eau feminises matters, adding an airiness built of citrus and lavender notes; compare Christine Nagel’s Agar Ebène for Hermès, in which the agarwood is softened by balsam fir.
For others, smoke can only mean tobacco. Caron’s Tabac Blond was the original flapper scent, launched after World War I to celebrate the cigarette-wielding woman: a tumultuous combination of iris and clove-like carnation at its heart. The orris-rich, oriental Tiempe Passate by Antonia’s Flowers is no less voluptuous, albeit in a minor key: the aroma of the morning after, when your skin smells salty with drinking, dancing and sin.
Le Labo’s cultish Santal 33 was influenced by the Marlboro Man: a cowboy and his horse silent in front of the campfire, on a great plain under evening skies. Jean-Paul Guerlain himself explained to me that his Vetiver was a portrait of a gardener’s cord jacket with a pipe in it. Kilian’s Light My Fire marks a tribute to the finest cigar tobacco; Ormonde Jayne’s skin scent Montabaco is cigar smoke on sun-warmed flesh; while Beat Café by Dominique Ropion for Jusbox conjures leather-jacketed beatniks drinking cognac at a Left Bank comptoir.
As for fireworks, Trudon’s Révolution by Lyn Harris recreates the smoke, sweat and oil of 1789, while Tonnerre, Beaufort’s evocation of the Battle of Trafalgar, is all thunderous cannonballs – Guy Fawkes, and then some.