Lab Notes: Leather Lust
Or, Fall is coming! Fall is coming!
Someone messaged me recently and asked something along the lines of, “What’s up with all the leather?” They wanted to know why we don’t offer more florals, more “traditional” scents.
I was outraged, obviously.
"Mom!" I said. "Jicky, Narcisse Noir, Tabu, Cuir de Russie!"
So many marvels, and so much leather, smoke and animalic texture running through early modern perfumery. What comes across to my audacious mother as non-traditional is, at least partially, an homage to classical perfumery and to an era when perfume wasn’t particularly concerned with smelling clean, polite or easily identifiable.
Side note: Growing up, my mom had that classic brass-and-mirror perfume tray on her vanity, with a few bulb-end atomizers but mostly the bold white and yellow florals that marked the ’70s and ’80s: Jungle Gardenia, Tatiana, Anaïs Anaïs, and a few from her tenure as a Jafra lady. For her, leather reads as either masculine or modern.
If our apporach is modern animaltm I guess it's largely thanks to the materials—and the vocabulary—we now have at our disposal. When I say leather, fragrance lovers immediately want to know: What kind of leather? Am I talking about saddle leather or a new sports car? Suede or motorcycle jacket? Bookbinding or driving glove? Leather can be polished, worn, buttery, smoky, animalic, tarry, supple or softly clean. It can smell expensive. It can smell dangerous. It can smell like something you've owned for twenty years.
We don’t use animal-derived materials, but they really aren’t necessary anymore, even for the skankiest animalics. There are dozens upon dozens of aroma chemicals we can pull from to build, roughen, soften, age or polish a leather accord. And naturals like osmanthus, cannabis, birch tar, frankincense, labdanum and other resins can contribute extraordinary leather effects of their own. Leather in perfumery isn't really a single note at all. It's a construction—and that makes it an almost ridiculously versatile playground for a perfumer.
So, back to what’s up with all the leather?
Joni and I live for transportive experiences. We want our scents to be an invocation—a way into a memory, an aspiration, a place, or even a version of yourself you haven’t met yet. Leather gives us an almost endless vocabulary for doing exactly that. It can be refined or rebellious, familiar or strange, pristine or beautifully worn. It carries evidence of the person who wore it, the places it has been, the life that happened around it.
Also, it’s leather. I mean, come on.
TOMBOY
Tomboy existed before we even had a fragrance house.
I originally made it thinking Joni would love it, but it turned out to be my favorite—and the earliest versions were far too skanky for her.
I softened it up a bit for launch, used an incredible picture of her from her hellion days as the first marketing image, and it became one of the earliest fragrances in the line.
It is still a personal favorite, and I take it with me anytime I travel because it feels like home.
Its leather isn't pristine or precious. It's lived-in leather: familiar, a little unruly, softened by wear and inseparable from the person wearing it.
BOHÈME
I didn’t grow up poor, exactly, but I had absolutely no frame of reference for the sensorial expressions of wealth.
*I was well into my twenties before I understood that sheets came in different thread counts, much less why anyone cared.
Bohème was a fantasy reconstruction of my childhood idea of an impossibly soft leather driving glove. At some point when I was a kid, I saw one in a film—a beautiful caramel-colored glove—and the image stayed with me.
I had no idea what something like that actually smelled like, but I imagined it.
To my young mind, that glove smelled like skin and candy and butlers and first-class flights.
That is Bohème: not wealth as I actually knew it, but wealth as I imagined it as a kid--calm, warm, confident, deep.
BELTANE
Beltane is leather by way of the bonfire.
Smoke that weaves its way into your hair, resin warming over flame, incense, and the much more assertive russian leather accord, historically crafted from the oil of pyrogenated birch wood.
Beltane is warm, smoky and elemental, named for the pagan holiday and the fires that mark it.
I adore it. I would make gallons of it for myself even if no one else wore it.
CLOSER
Closer is leather club chairs in some imagined Golden Age of Adventure tropical estate: those big, slow-circling ceiling fans, dark wood, old maps, humidity pressing against the skin and something strong poured into a heavy glass.
This is what we imagined Hemingway, Shackleton or Isak Dinesen might wear— in the slightly impossible universe where all three could end up drinking together in the same far-flung club.
The leather here is deep, worn and worldly. It has traveled.
The fact that people regularly tell us Closer is our sexiest scent makes me think we landed that punch.
Velvet Tango
Velvet Tango is leather after dark.
The leather is smoother here—less saddle and more beautifully made valise, the sort you might imagine carrying a very good bottle of smoky Scotch.
Polished rather than rugged, with the softness that comes from expensive leather handled often and well.
If Tomboy is the leather you live in, and Closer is the leather that has stories to tell, Velvet Tango is the leather you bring when you intend to make some.
