Shooting Star by Jennifer Connell

In all three versions of the movie “A Star is Born” a major male star who is just starting his decline bumps into a young unknown talented performer and over the course of time her career takes off meteorically until she is a bigger star than the man who discovered her. One of the messages in the movies is that precocious unbridled talent will eventually emerge and burn brightly.

Calice Becker

I would call 1996 a turning point year, especially in the department store fragrances, as it seemed perfume companies were willing to take more chances. One of those chances was taken by one of the biggest designer names Tommy Hilfiger as he sought to follow up the very successful masculine release, Tommy, with one for the young women who were wearing his All-American clothing designs. The chance they took was to give the design of this perfume to a young perfumer, Calice Becker. Tommy Girl would be Mme Becker’s first solo flight as perfumer. She had worked her way up in Givaudan and now Tommy Girl was where she would start her career.

Someone less sure of her skill would easily have played it safe and just riffed on what perfumers Alberto Morillas and Annie Buzantian did with Tommy the year before. Instead Mme Becker captured the youth and assurance that those who were wearing Tommy Hilfiger’s clothing had, in spades, as Tommy Girl felt both young and energetic. There are so many perfumes that promise energy in their PR but Tommy Girl has an almost palpable electricity to it, barely contained.  Rarely does a perfumer match the vibe of a brand so perfectly. Tommy Girl really is almost a time capsule which symbolizes a large segment of women in their 20’s in 1996. To capture this liveliness Mme Becker dipped back into her Russian heritage, and a samovar of black tea, which she surrounded with all of the most crowd-pleasing floral notes on the perfumer’s palette. It is the choice of that black tea accord as the core of Tommy Girl which was both inventive and innovative at the time. In the years since there have been scores of black tea-centric fragrances but it was Mme Becker who introduced it to the masses.

Tommy Girl starts with a beautiful manicured lawn over which a breeze of apple blossom and camellia softly meet your senses. Somewhere tea is brewing as the tea accord creates the nucleus upon which jasmine, rose, violet, and honeysuckle will attach and orbit around. All of this is laid over a foundation of cedar and sandalwood.

Tommy Girl has average longevity and above average sillage.

Yann Vasnier and Calice Becker at the 2010 FiFi Awards

As I revisited Tommy Girl in preparation to write this piece it occurred to me that Tommy Girl might be the perfume which also heralded the re-imagination of the Eau de Cologne as there are many of the hallmarks we are seeing  in the renaissance of cologne we are currently experiencing. That might be a stretch but I’m feeling I’m on much firmer ground with my next statement. Tommy Girl was the debut fragrance for a perfumer I consider to be one of the ten best perfumers working today. Mme Becker has not only lived up to the promise she has exceeded it and she is among a select few of perfumers who have never bored me. Her niche creations are the reason niche perfume exists, with her work for By Kilian as Exhibit A. She is still able to make award winning mass-market fragrances and in 2010 won a FiFi award for Marc Jacobs Lola which she composed with Yann Vasnier. For the last seventeen years Mme Becker truly has been a star in the olfactory firmament.

Disclosure: This review was based on a bottle of Tommy Girl I purchased.

–Mark Behnke, Managing Editor

Editor’s note: EIC Michelyn Camen did a fabulous interview with Calice Becker in 2011 which you can find at this link.