Coty

Saturday night saw Christelle and I making our way to Brassaii at 461 King Street in Toronto to attend the Coty holiday preview.  Some of the fragrances are out already which you can see here and others that are still on their way - lots of florals - which is good for you floral lovers - and of course lots of beautiful bottles!  I encouraged Christelle to eat a lot (not that it requires much prompting) because I wanted the cute waiter to keep coming by and we had a great time people watching - some crazy looking people attend these things!
If you ever thought being a model might be glamorous, get that notion out of your head right now!  You get to wear crazy hats, bubble wrap dresses and wander around in high heels for hours spraying unsuspecting people with fragrances - like department store fragrance ladies but nakeder! Before you call a fashion intervention, the BANG girls were just doing their job to promote the new Marc Jacobs fragrance called, you guessed it, BANG!  You'll find it at Holt Renfrew this month and at Shoppers Drug Mart, Murale, The Bay, London Drugs, Jean Coutu and Sephora in October.  It is a really different smelling fragrance, very peppery!  It has top notes of black, pink and white peppercorns, a heart of masculine woody notes and a base of elemi resinoid, benzoin, vetyver, white moss and patchouli - it is definitely unlike anything I can remember smelling before.  It retails for: 50ml EDT - $69, 100ml EDT $95, 150ml After Shave Balm $67, 75g Deostick $32.


And as it's Toronto Film Festival season, the Coty party was followed by a TIFF party for "It's Kind Of A Funny Story" where the very lovely Emma Roberts was in attendance
as well as Zach Galifianakis - why it couldn't be a party for someone pretty like Taylor Lautner or hunky like George Clooney I just don't understand...!

My Coty Chypre bottle is of the 1970-80s reissue, not the 1917 original. It's an EDT, fresh and sharp, and I feel extremely lucky to have and wear even a late edition of this iconic fragrance.

Coty's Chypre gave its name to the entire chypre genre. A bergamot top note, floral heart and a dry-down of oakmoss, patchouli and an animalic something or other- that's a basic chypre. It can and have been embellished, thickened and darkened, but the original one by Coty, at least the version in my cabinet is clean and streamlined with that very geometric art deco feel. It's brighter than I expected from a scent rumored to be worn by Dorothy Parker, but decidedly crisp and angular. Coty's Chypre is green and floral- it illuminates the road leading to Chanel No. 19 and Miss Dior among many others. Roja Dove writes about a gorgeous jasmine heart, but at least in this later version the heart is too abstract to single out any one flower. There's some rose there, but it's dry and pale, not a garden party in June.

The entire composition feels more subdued than I imagined it to be, but it makes sense. Chypre was a popular, wearable perfume, not an historic relic. It was composed to appeal and entice the elegant women of its time and as such it's perfect and beautiful. I wish the dry-down I'm smelling was more animalic and dirty- I get a really nice musk, but it's on the polite side of things and wouldn't offend in a crowded space. Still, Chypre is gorgeous, iconic and makes me wish I had spent the previous decades hunting down old bottles before everyone else was doing it.

Chypre and the rest of the classic Coty perfumes as they once were are no longer with us. I doubt sending angry letters to the corporate headquarters would make any difference. They're too busy churning out another J. Lo perfume.

Image: Dorothy Parker by Australian artist Deborah Klein, 1991

Those who only know Coty and its classics from the drugstore versions of the last couple of decades would never guess the cheap smelling vile liquid called Emeraude used to be a magical and sensual perfume, something a well-coiffed fashionable woman would wear when dressing up. Four years older than Guerlain's Shalimar (1921 vs. 1925), the similarity between these two big orientals are striking, especially as the scent opens and unfolds. Emeraude has the same wood and vanilla lusciousness, and a distinct opoponax note.

Between the various versions and concentrations of vintage Shalimar I own and my small bottle of 1950s or 60s Emeraude parfum I doubt I'd be able tell which is which in a quick blind test. But the late drydown of Emeraude is gorgeous and so distinct- it manages to smell both cleaner and more animalic than Shalimar. Don't ask me how it's even possible. Maybe it's the absence of the somewhat murky and burnt note in Shalimar (not that there's anything wrong with that). It's also less powdery, I think, and feels a bit more hard-edged, which I enjoy quite a bit. Not more or better than Shalimar (my heart still belongs to the Guerlinade), just different enough to make knowing and wearing both worth my time.

The bottom line is that Emeraude used to be dazzling and majestic. It's one more example proving the fall of the House of Coty. Don't bother with the stuff at Wallgreens. Instead, go rummage through your great aunt's belongings and borrow the bottle she saved for special dates. Maybe she also have a good story or two.

Vintage Emeraude perfume ads from the 1940s and 1950s- vintageadbrowser.com

The danger in getting into vintage perfumes is that sooner or later one of them will break your heart. The one that did it to me is La Rose Jacqueminot by Coty. It was one of Francois Coty's first creations, originally released in 1905 (according to Roja Dove. Other sources point to 1906). My bottle is the 1980s reissue of the eau de perfume, so it's not that I'm even yearning for something all that old and unattainable, but knowing that this beauty is gone and would probably not be seen again is painful.

I'm not even a rose person, but this is a very dark and thick rose. I don't know if it ever had lighter top notes that my bottle has lost or if it always been about red wine and roses right from the start. It's a date night perfume, low lights, silk and velvet, black eyeliner and hushed tones. There's quite a bit of spice in its heart which makes me think of faraway places.  I smell cardamom, nutmeg and a dirty wood base, a touch of oud, maybe, sandalwood and tobacco. It's rich, romantic, completely devoid of sunshine and so beautiful it makes me dress up to deserve it. La Rose Jacqueminot makes you realize just how much we've lost when Coty turned into a dreck for the masses company it is today, and that's a big part of the heartbreak involved.

Coty's La Rose Jacqueminot was discontinued long ago. Bottles of the later reissue pop up online here and there (there's one right now on eBay, but it's the EDT, so I don't know how it compares to the one I have).

Have you had your heart broken by a vintage perfume? Let's commiserate.

Images:
1939 fashion photo myvintagevogue.com
La Rose Jacqueminot ad from allposters.com
Coty ad from 1943 by Carl Erickson paperpursuits.com

I don't have a complete list of notes, any official (or semi-official) information or even a copy of a print ad from the 1946 release of Coty's Les Muses. All I have is my bottle of the 1970s-80s reissue, my nose and a slew of compliments I get whenever I wear it. Seriously, even my husband likes it and doesn't complain about it "smelling like vintage", probably because it doesn't have a thick layer of expired aldehydes in the opening and the overall impression is sweet and smooth.

Les Muses smells pretty. Very pretty. It's enthusiastic and uplifting to the point of elation- something in the sunny floral blend, I assume. I smell tuberose and muguet and they hang in the air and reverberate like the sound of a silver bell. It makes sense that such exuberance was created just after the end of World War II. It's the kind of scent that makes me want to take the stairs two at a time, wear a cute dress and skip outside.

I smell wood in the drydown, especially a very nice sandalwood- a little sweet, not too creamy. Les Muses lasts and holds its structure for hours, even though my bottle is only of the EDT (it looks the same as the Chypre reissue from the same time period). It's another reminder of Coty's past and heritage, now sadly gone and drown in a vat of celebrity perfumes and cheapened drugstore scents.

Les Muses was originally released in 1946, discontinued at some point in the 60s and reissued again in the late(?) 1970s together with Chypre and La Rose Jacqueminot. Bottles keep popping online, though mostly are of the later incarnation like mine. I have no idea if and how much it differs from the original.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaed, life.com

The photo at the top and Complice have something in common. Both are from 1973 but were made to look and feel about 40 years older. The early 1970s were about the last time Coty (the company) actually cared about making real perfumes instead of regurgitating lame formulas for even lamer celebrities.  The notes for Complice were left by Francois Coty before his death in 1934, hence the direct reference to him on the bottle and box. The bottle design was also made to evoke the days of yore, when Coty perfumes were poured into Lalique bottles.

Complice has a very aldehydic opening, which makes the husband wrinkle his nose, shrug and say it smells "like vintage" (interestingly enough, he's learned to recognize Chanel aldehydes, vintage or not, and no longer complain about them). My bottle is old enough that the other top notes, bergamot and orange blossom, have been eaten by time and aldehydes. Thankfully, the floral part takes over pretty quickly, and it is dry, elegant and quite lovely. You can argue about the peach and lilac (I get the former, though not the latter), but what makes Complice so attractive to me is a long lasting heart of orris and narcissus. It's borderline bitter and feels  almost formal in its crispness.

The drydown, mossy, woody with just a hint of animalic heat feels like coming home, kicking the high heels, unbuttoning the white shirt just a little and taking out the pins holding your hair up. At this point the perfume is not very feminine in today's standard, but I find it quite sexy and I suspect other vintage and oakmoss fiends would feel the same way.

Complice was discontinued by Coty about 25-30 years ago. Bottles can still be found online here and there. I have the parfum in the bottle you see in the ad, but have never tried the EDT.

Images:
Fashion photo from British Vogue, 1973 (myvintagevogue.com)
1976 Complice de Francis Coty ad (hprints.com)

In 1921, many years before YSL has commissioned Sophia Grojsman to create Paris, François Coty had his own vision for a perfume capturing the city. It's interesting to note that Coty's Paris was a contemporary of Chanel No. 5, one of those fragrances that say "French Perfume" from the very first whiff. I've never smelled No. 5 in its most original form (if some well-meaning but utterly misguided Chanel rep is going to jump in with the "Chanel No. 5 is the same as ever" line I'm going to through something heavy at them), and my bottle of Coty Paris doesn't go quite as far back (it's most likely from the late 1960s), but I suspect that there were some similarities there, at least in the general feel of the two perfumes.

Octavian Coifan's breakdown of Paris' formula reveals an aldehydic floral with a typical (to that period) rich, animalic base. What I smell from both the EDT and the Parfum de Toilette  I've tried is a somewhat abstract floral heart- the specific seems to have been blurred and smoothed over the years, so I can't say I get any hyacinth or lilac (though I definitely wish I had). It's very full and round, though the EDT is sharper, as is usually the case. The next phase is a delicious heliotrope-peach. It's beautiful and very satisfying, making me think not so much of a ripe peach or its skin, but of the stone inside.

The lovely almost-sweet-but-not-quite lasts for hours. I've been decanting into a small spray atomizer, because the perfume grabs the skin better when sprayed. It feels womanly and sexy in a rich, understated way. Is it very Parisienne? I'm not sure- Paris for me is just much about Guerlain, Lutens and the other usual suspects. What's obvious is that we all lost a large piece of perfumery's history when Coty turned its back on tradition and quality and signed Jennifer Lopez and Shania Twain (Coty the company, that is. Monsieur Coty has been rolling in his grave for many decades by that time).

Paris, like many of Coty's original classics was discontinued years ago. Bottles pop up on eBay from time to time.

Original Coty Paris perfume ad: okadi.com

For those of you who have been missing your Calvin Klein colour cosmetics - good news - they're coming back!  Calvin Klein Inc. and Coty Inc. recently announced that they will develop and market a full line of colour cosmetics that will launch in 2012. 

I'm not sure why the line didn't take off last time it was launched, but I have faith that Coty will be able to make a go of it!  And if they would be so kind as to bring back the Cosmopolitan Lipstick, I would be ever so grateful!