Coco Mademoiselle

At Sephora, yesterday, I once again let myself be seduced by the pretty bottle and serene pink juice, and I spritzed my wrist again with Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle. I think that part of the problem is that I have trouble remembering in between times what Coco Mademoiselle smells like, and I keep reconstructing in my mind what I imagine it to smell like--a sparer, younger version of the great Coco. And I spritz.

OK, so I don't forget this again, Coco Mademoiselle smells a lot like a Shirley Temple. As a number of people have pointed out, it is really a fruity floral, not an Oriental, as it has been wrongly promoted, and the predominant note, to me, seems to be grenadine. Not pomegranate, Rose's grenadine. Maybe that's the litchi the official notes refer to. I detect the same note in Gaultier's Ma Dame. Ma Dame disappointed the hell out of me. I spritzed it in Sephora also, and for about five minutes, it smelled like what I've been hunting for for ages, a richer, deeper version of Clinique's Happy. Then the top notes faded, and the plasticized Shirley Temple came on full blast.

This note, whatever it may be, seems prominent in a lot of the popular fragrances of the past several years, and I can't stand it. It's not a bad smell, it's just the last thing I would ever want to smell like. Artificial and sweet.

Coco Mademoiselle dries down into something less fruity, and rather more pleasant, but I smell plastic all the way to the bottom. Note to self: do not spray this on me again. It is not working.

Vierges et Toreros

You have to love a perfume, for one thing, called 'Virgins and Toreros', although I am baffled by Etat Libre d'Orange's decision to title it in French, which makes no sense at all.


V&T starts off with a mad flamenco stomp of serious white flowers, followed by a mad flamenco stomp of rawhide. We are not kidding around with the leather on this one. We are not talking about nice glove leather, or subtle suede, or gentleman's tack, or that soft musky smell that sometimes gets called 'leather' in perfume. We're talking that stiff, unfinished orangey stuff that smells to high heaven of LEATHER. The overall impact is sexy, up-in-your-face, and is basically the scent equivalent of the sound of mariachi brass.

Then the Play-Doh gets involved. Within ten minutes, surfacing slowly from the rough leather, this salty, doughy, incredibly familiar smell. Stomping and twirling like a matador in the suit of lights made entirely from Play-Doh. Ole.

Chanel No. 5

When my parents and I flew to San Diego for my grandmother's funeral, we stayed in the little apartment she had lived in for the last several years of her life. On the counter in the bathroom was a half-empty bottle of Chanel No. 5.

I idly sprayed a dab of it on my wrist, thinking, I think, that it would smell like her. It didn't, it smelled to me of generic grandmotherly perfume, but didn't spark any particular smell memory. Too powdery and archaic for me at the time--I was not even a newbie perfumista at the time--and I put it aside.

Now, I should explain, before I come to my most recent experiment with Chanel's great masterpiece, that my grandma was horribly allergic to most fragrant flowers. We never sent flowers for birthdays, and they were never in her home. I remember walking with her in Golden Gate Park, hearing her reminisce about the time my aunt and a friend of hers, with the best of intentions, filled her room with jasmine blooms in little vases. She woke up to breakfast in bed, but was unable to open her eyes, which had swelled up from all the jasmine.

A few weeks ago, I was walking through the Macy's in downtown San Francisco, and hovered briefly by the Chanel counter. On a whim, I picked up the Chanel No. 5 EDP and sprayed my inner arm heavily.

The first hit was of dusty, chypric notes, less powdery than I recalled, and then, five minutes later, as I walked out of the store, I was hit with a high, screeching note that emerged out of nowhere, and which I could only identify dazedly as smelling like peaches in syrup and mint. It howled. I had no idea what it was, since as best I could remember the official notes of No. 5, Screaming Minty Fruit Salad was not among them.

Today, walking by the baseball field on a sunny spring day, I got hit with the smell again, this time in context, and now I know--that's the jasmine, that high heady screech smell. Funny, and a little bit ironic, that the note I smell strongest in No. 5 is the one that, on the vine, would make my grandmother flee the garden.