You Don’t Wear No Perfume

Posted in Smell-O-Rama |

My closest male friend went to New York City one summer to visit relatives. When he returned, he brought back trendy clothes and samples of the latest scent-sation, Dior’s Poison. I couldn’t believe there was a perfume with that name, especially one that smelled so delicious. It was like grapes and velvet and what I thought opium should smell like (the drug, not the fragrance). I wanted to eat it. He raved about how it was revolutionizing the perfume world (unsurprisingly he later came out of the closet) and I didn’t doubt it. Again, it was one that was too pricey for me to purchase, but which I worshipped wholeheartedly through my dedication to gathering as many sample vials of it as I could find.

Continuing the trend of oddly named fragrances, I started wearing Calvin Klein’s Obsession a year or so later. The original bottle was squat and brown and looked nothing like what I thought perfume bottles should look like. The top twisted off, and as a result, I probably spilled more of the stuff than I actually wore. And if I thought Diorissimo was strong. . . oh boy. This stuff was like clove cigarettes and cinnamon sticks. It frequently gave me a headache but I wore it anyway, just to be contrary. I can still recall the Halloween of 1986, stinking of Obsession, and listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees on my Walkman.

In university years, I worked for the dining commons. During the summers and holidays, when there were no students around, we frequently did catering events for the university chancellor. At one such event, pots of fresh Narcissus flowers were brought in as decorations. The smell was intoxicating and unbelievably familiar. I kept sneaking sniffs at the lovely white flowers. Then it hit me: this was Diorissimo. Back at home, I dragged out my now-ancient bottle. The fragrance had turned to mostly alcohol, but that was definitely it. I spent $50 that I didn’t have at Nordstrom’s, the only place I could find which carried it. Although I smell it as Narcissus flowers, it is apparently the only truly accurate Lily Of The Valley fragrance ever created. Whatever the origin, it’s still gorgeous.

I tried out Amarige by Givenchy in the early 90s, and it was nice, but it just didn’t hold my interest past that one bottle. In fact, no recent high-end fragrances have done anything but make me feel queasy (a trend that started with Calvin Klein’s Eternity and never stopped). The last one I bought was in 1993: Marcella Borghese’s Il Bacio, which has similar fruity qualities to Poison, but some of the spice of Obsession. I rarely use it, however, as it seems far too strong for daily wear. I even went through a strange nostalgic phase of wearing Love’s Baby Soft in the mid-90s, but never found anything I liked as much as those fragrances of the late 70s and mid 80s, until The Gap came out with Grass in 1994.

Technically, this isn’t a perfume, but I love it anyway. It really does smell like fresh cut grass, but without all the allergens. They discontinued it not long after it came out for reasons I will never understand. I still have one bottle with a few drops left as well as two small tins of solid fragrance. In an interesting twist, the new Fresh Cut Grass home fragrance oil from The Body Shop does smell quite similar, but also has notes of Diorissimo, which of course made me yearn for another bottle.

I read online that the formula for Diorissimo has recently changed and that it no longer smells quite the same. And I’ve also learned that The Gap has reissued Grass, but one reviewer laments that it no longer smells the way it used to, either. Still, this is promising news. Maybe I’ll try some Diorissimo and if it passes my smell test, I will go back to my sample-vial-hoarding ways (do they even still make those tiny things?). If it evokes the same memories it used to, that might just be good enough for me.

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