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Mitsouko (Guerlain)
Whenever I am asked to name my favourite fragrance, or the best fragrance ever, or the fragrance I would take with me if I had to move to Mars for tax reasons, I always say Mitsouko. This elicits, broadly speaking, three types of response: perfumers yawn, beginners write down the name and aficionados decide I am a staid sort of chap. In truth, it is a bit like saying your favourite painting is the Mona Lisa (not mine, by the way).
Mitsouko’s history illustrates to perfection the twin forces of innovation and imitation that move perfumery forward. It was released in 1919, supposedly the result of a love affair Jacques Guerlain had with Japan or a lady therein. But there is nothing Japanese about Mitsouko, aside from the name. It is, as has been said countless times before, an improvement on François Coty’s Chypre, released two years earlier. Chypre, in turn, was based on a three-component accord so perfect that it remains unsurpassed and fertile in new developments 90 years later. They smell, respectively, of citrus resinous, sweet-amber resinous and bitter resinous. Picture them as equal sectors making up a pie chart, sticking to each other via the resin. The resulting genre, called a chypre, has two fundamental qualities: balance and abstraction. Chypre is long gone, but I’ve had occasion to smell both vintage samples and the Osmothèque museum’s reconstruction in Versailles. It is brilliant, but it does have a big-boned, bad-tempered, Joan Crawford feel to it. It was a fragrance in whose company you could never entirely rest your weight.
Jacques Guerlain was Juan Gris to Coty’s Picasso, obsessed with fullness, finish, detail. To Chypre, he added the peach note of undecalactone, quite a lot of iris and probably 20 other things we’ll never know about. The lactone makes a huge difference: it works like a Tiffany lamp, adding a touch of muted warmth and colour, and, unlike ester-based fruit notes, lasts for ever. The effect of these additions is a ripening of the chypre structure into a masterpiece whose richness brings to my mind the mature chamber music of Johannes Brahms.
Mitsouko is also a survivor, most recently having dodged a bullet aimed straight at its heart by the European Union’s chemical phobia. It looked, for a while, as if it was going to be reformulated in a hurry. In the end, the great Edouard Fléchier brought Mitsouko into conformity with EU rules and it still smells great, though it arguably doesn’t last as long as the old one.
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Originally Posted by Кошка Мурка
