My introduction to chypre did not come from the end of an atomizer instead it came from the pages of Dashiell Hammett’s classic hard-boiled detective novel The Maltese Falcon. It was the summer of 1970 and I had seen the movie starring Humphrey Bogart and wanted to read the book. It still remains, to this day, one of the most faithful book- to-movie adaptations I’ve encountered. As I was young and still learning about the world through my love of books my first encounter with chypre comes on page 42 of my edition of The Maltese Falcon:

 

 

“Mr. Joel Cairo was a small-boned man of medium height. His hair was black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fitted his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.”

 

 Peter Lorre

Of course in my internal dialog I read chypre as kai-pre. It wouldn’t be for another ten years that I heard it pronounced correctly as sheep-ra.  As an avid reader I had already begun to use context to try and help me decipher what a word could mean. As I paused to think about what chypre could be; I figured out it was like the cologne my father wore. Joel Cairo sounded more refined than my dad so I thought chypre would smell more complex than my father’s Hai Karate. I was thinking chypre must smell strong sort of spicy like incense. So was chypre the smell of male sophistication? I asked myself.

 

 

Another thing I learned as a young reader was when you didn’t know what a word meant you looked it up in the dictionary. When I got to my Merriam-Webster here is what I found:

Chypre; n.:  a nonalcoholic perfume containing oils and resins.

Based on that I cheerfully went back to my book thinking I was closer to right than I really was. As I continued the chase for The Maltese Falcon it smelled of resins and oil.

 

 

The question, now that I am a perfumista, is which chypre it could have been that Joel Cairo was wearing. The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930 and based on my research there are really only three candidates that Joel Cairo could have been wearing. The alpha chypre of them all, Coty Chypre, released in 1917; Molinard Chypre from 1919; or Guerlain Mitsouko which also debuted in 1919.

 

 

If it was Guerlain Mitsouko that Joel Cairo wore, that would be a certain amount of serendipity, because in my search for a chypre I was looking to my father. Instead I should have looked to my mother because Mitsouko was her signature scent and every night when she tucked me into bed and gave me a kiss to sleep Mitsouko really was “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

–Mark Behnke, Managing Editor

Leave a comment  about  your favorite Chypre- pronounced (sheepruh) or which of the three you think   Joel Cairo wore….  Coty Chypre, Molinard Chypre or  Guerlain Mitsouko