In these days of increasingly senior moments, birthdays are one of the few things I don’t forget.  My encyclopaedic recall of these dates is a popular party trick, along with speaking German in a Belfast accent.  I remember the birthdays not just of friends and family, but of people from my distant past, like the boy I played table tennis with once in a hotel in the Isle of Man in ‘73.  No idea what his name was, or the name of the hotel, but 28^th January is engraved on my mind.  I had thought of finding a commercial outlet for this Rain Mannish talent – a birthday-reminding service, perhaps – but Facebook went and beat me to it.

 

 

 

 

As well as remembering birthdays, I set a lot of store by them, not least my own.  Friends know that they ignore my special day at their peril.  Yet more and more of them are choosing to live dangerously, and annual card counts are in terminal decline.

 

 

 

 

Do I believe in all that zodiac business, you may be wondering?  Well, I have found that the broad personality traits attributed to certain signs hold true in my own circle – sensitive Pisceans, secretive Scorpios, pernickety Virgos, etc. – but I wouldn’t push it too far.  I daresay more may be gleaned if you know your precise time of birth, and can factor in other planetary influences that affect your astrological chart.  Unfortunately, my mother’s lack of attention to detail while giving birth to me has scuppered any chances of having my chart drawn up: she has only the vaguest idea of the moment I arrived, lamely offering the comment that “it was dark”.  Compared to the split second precision and clickfest of photos with which births are documented nowadays, there is only the sketchiest record of my own entry into the world. 

 

This fixation with birthdays, coupled with regret at my blurry start in life, may explain my curiosity about fragrance launches from the year I was born.  I wanted to see if any of them might smell like “me”, and help me connect with those early years.  Oh dear…what a duff vintage 1959 seems to have been!  According to the Basenotes Fragance Directory, all but two of the feminine scents have been discontinued, including Calypso by Robert Piguet (though a reworked version was released in 2010), and Bacara and Ciel d’Eté from the perfume house Piver (which is not on my radar at all). 

 

Then after that, it just gets silly:

 

Avon Kavon (shades of the “Gruesome Twosome”?  Don’t come calling with that!)

Colgate Mantrap (oral hygiene is good, but there is more to the science of attraction than regular brushing)

Prince Matchabelli Sheer Madness (you said it)

 

 

 

 

The most famous fragrance release from 1959 (still in continuous production) has to be Grès Cabochard.  Its reformulation during that time is the subject of a bitter lament by Luca Turin in Perfumes: The Guide, “bitter” being the operative word.  He compares the scent to a clapped-out looking Peter O’Toole, whom he happened to spot on a London tube:

 

“This Cabochard is much the same: ravaged by years of abuse, gaunt, bleary-eyed, prematurely aged, heartbreaking to those who knew Bernard Chant’s masterpiece in its heyday…This is Cabochard chewed down to a frazzle by accountant moths.  If you never smelled the original, you would think Cabochard was merely Eau du Soir with fence varnish added.”

 

Crikey…  Do I dare try it again to see if I agree?  The Scentimentalist gave me a bottle of Cabochard for my 50^th birthday: she knows perfectly well the sorts of perfumes I like, so the gesture was largely symbolic.  From my timorous squirt around that time in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I seem to remember the current formulation as a rather urinous (which my spellchecker wants to change to “ruinous”), acerbic, leather chypre.  What is the next level up in intensity from “fierce”, I wonder?  “Vitriolic”? “Cruel”? “Bile-spewing”? “A bit like being stabbed with a pointy stick”? 

 

 

 

 

Right, I am going to bite the bullet and have another spray…Oh, and check out the white pussycat bow on the bottle.  Are they having a laugh or what?!  Here goes – just in the crook of my elbow, as I am going out to dinner and don’t want to frighten the horses.  Okay, so first impressions are that this is sharp and leathery, but I have smelt worse.  Amouage Homage Attar, for example, which I dubbed “Attila the Attar” – why, that was like Caron Yatagan on acid and in 3D, and completely ruined a family day out to Chester.  Hold on, I believe I may detect some faintly perfumey floral notes thrashing about in their tweed straightjacket with leather straps…

 

Now I’ve just looked Cabochard up in Roja Dove’s book, The Essence of Perfume, where he devotes a double spread to it.  He explains that the name means “stubborn” or “headstrong”, which is interesting, and while conceding that the leathery heart achieved with isobutyl quinoline is “quite brutal”, adds that it is tempered by a “violet-like ionone that interplays with rose and jasmine”.  There we go – perhaps those were trussed up flowers I was smelling.

 

Notes: bergamot, mandarin, galbanum, ylang ylang, jasmine, Bulgarian rose, clove, oakmoss, tobacco, musk, iris, sandalwood, vetiver, leather, castoreum, patchouli and labdanum.

 

 

 

Well, I never – on paper there are at least four varieties of flowers – there’s even ylang-ylang, my go-to slutty note, though I swear you’d never know.  But I will say that Cabochard is softer and a little more floral than I remember.  It is nowhere near as bitter as Halston Couture, say, with which it has some compositional crossover (bergamot, jasmine, rose, patchouli and oakmoss), though it is still too bitter for my taste.  This is a slightly rough, rasping leather – more akin to the strap on a cheap satchel bag than the buttery kid glove leather of Chanel Cuir de Russie, say – though it is softening with time…

 

 

In summary, two years on from my first trial this is far from my worst nightmare, but let’s park Cabochard for the moment and look at the alternative, Creed Jasmal, to see if I might have more of an affinity with that as a scent to represent my birth year.  Until I came to write this piece, I was under the mistaken impression that Jasmal was created as a wedding scent for Grace Kelly.  I thought to myself that I don’t have any more in common with the ice blonde good looks of the former actress and royal than I do with a raddled Peter O’Toole.  That is going way too far in the other direction.  The only similarities between me and Grace Kelly are the fact that I lived on the Riviera for a year and rode my moped on the same stretch of windy cliff top road on which she met her untimely end two years later.  Oh, and she was in Dial M for Murder, and it has been suggested that – viewed through half closed eyes and in a very bad light – Mr Bonkers bears a passing resemblance to the young Alfred Hitchcock.  

 

 

 

 

But in hunting down a note list I realised that I am getting Jasmal muddled with Fleurissimo from 1972.  Jasmal was in fact created for the actress Natalie Wood, who as it happens also died in a transport-related accident – in her case a boat.  She was also too voluptuous and glamorous for me to relate to, but at least she had brown hair.  So I am giving Jasmal another go today as well, to see if it is a better fit as a birth year scent than the forbidding Cabochard.

Notes: bergamot, Italian and Moroccan jasmine, Ambergris, galbanum

 

 

Now, while Cabochard was better than I remembered, Jasmal is much the same.  It borders on a soliflore to my nose, what UK fumeheads would call a “Ronseal jasmine”, after the TV ads for – funnily enough – fence varnish, which had the strapline: “It does exactly what it says on the tin”.  As well as being straightforward, Jasmal is cool, green and indolic on me: not in the cat-on-heat manner of Serge Lutens A La Nuit, though.  Rather, it has a more distant and clinical kind of sensuality, like a high class escort lying back and thinking of the money.  It is pretty, but it doesn’t move me.

Well, that’s a bit of a let-down!  As a 59-er, I find myself tossed between the Scylla and Charybdis of a whip-cracking chypre in a hacking jacket and a pretty, but emotionally flatlining jasmine.  Whereas, allowing for the fuzziness of my natal statistics – and the very real possibility that it may all be a load of baloney – I do at least feel at home in my star sign of Gemini.  And I haven’t got a problem with my birthstones and colours (which vary widely depending on where you look), or with being a people-pleasing pig in the Chinese calendar.  But the alignment of my olfactory planets in the twin houses of Grès and Creed is, on the face of it, an unhappy accident.

Though didn’t I just say that Cabochard means “stubborn”?  So I am going to persevere with that one, which is already better than I thought.  Besides, if corduroy is making a comeback in 2011, hacking jackets surely can’t be far behind…

 

 

 

Photo Credits:

Birth year card from 1959 from www.acardandagift.com

Me as a baby at Helen's Bay from personal collection and the car shot from www.carandclassic.co.uk

Zodiac chart from www.seanpercival.com

Baby boomer chart from www.scienceblogs.com

Vintage Cabochard from www.fast-autos.net

Modern Cabochard from www.breakthrough4u.nl

Peter O'Toole from www.thecia.com.au

Scary leather shoe from www.liberty.co.uk  

Jasmal bottle from www.perfumesnow.com

Natalie Wood from www.zh.wikipedia.org 

Hacking jacket from www.anatomyfashion.co.uk  and cushion showing three fabrics together from www.bouf.com

 

–Vanessa Musson, Contributor

This draw is an ode to Natalie Wood, and to CREED Jasmal. A 75 ml flacon of Jasmal is beeing offered by www.creedboutiques.com

Please leave a comment about  CREED, Jasmal, Natalie Wood, or a fragrance created the year that you were born to be eligible. Due to high demand for this fragrance . The winner will receive the flacon in mid March as its being flown in From FRANCE.