An Elegy for Gris Clair

Violence and grief, incense and lavender

On the day I went to inspect a house I was thinking of moving to, I returned to my apartment to find that I’d been robbed.

The irony of this, in the days following, was not lost on me. It has an air of unreality to it, like something out of a bad tv show, to the point where when I was explaining what had happened to my friends I would find myself apologetically saying ‘I know it sounds insane...’

Like a house in a horror movie that doesn’t want to let you go, my apartment knew I was thinking of leaving and fate had its way.

The apartment was a mess and there was a split second where I tried to remember if I had left it that way in the morning. But I hadn’t. Still standing in the doorway of my tiny studio apartment, my eyes jumped to the monitor on my desk (still there) and then to my pretty ancient Mac computer (very much gone).

I don’t remember much from the rest of that night - the panic, the clenching in my chest, crying, calling my mother - but I remember turning around to the green cabinets where I kept my perfumes and seeing that my grab tray, the little display on the top of the shelves where I would stop every morning to spray my perfume before going to work, was gone.

I don’t own as many perfumes as people assume I do. True, I own more than someone who isn’t an obsessive, but I have a policy of only buying perfumes I love and that I know I will wear often. These are the scents of my commute, my grocery runs, what I spray on the pillow before I go to sleep. I usually buy perfumes to mark special occasions - a birthday, an achievement, a new job. I may have a large sample collection, but curating my bottles is a labour of love.

Perfume is my hobby, my fascination, the endless well of discovery into which I willingly throw myself. It, like a friendship, is a part of my life entirely out of choice and not obligation, and this makes perfume special. -I think this is why, more than the computer or the hair straightener, it hurt so much to have it stolen from me.

I sat on my bed that night, too shaken and too scared to do much but stare at where I had padlocked the door. I’d logged a police report online like filling out a YouTube survey - ‘Were any items of value taken from your residence? Please list under question 4’. Figuring I was on a roll and didn’t have much to lose, I applied for the house I’d gone to visit that afternoon.

I wanted badly to clean but the police form, in between the drop-click menus and the captcha asking me to choose all the images with fire hydrants, said not to touch anything until forensics came. So I sat in the mess, and cried a bit more, and waited.

It is best to let a wound settle and start to bruise before you begin poking at it. I gave myself the night, falling into an exhausted sleep, and in the morning opened up the notes app on my phone to try and list out what perfumes had been taken.

It was early September, my birthday month, and the beginning of spring in Australia. In another irony, I had changed out my tray a couple of weeks before, putting most of my winter scents into the cupboard and bringing out some of my lighter perfumes for the warmer weather.

I started listing them, remembering how I got each bottle and thinking of how difficult it would be to buy another, trying to picture the tray in my mind, pressing, pressing, pressing on the bruise.

There was the bottle of Black Orchid I had bought on my first solo trip to Sydney when I was very young and just beginning to become obsessed with perfume; a tiny, vintage bottle of The Body Shop’s White Musk; there was my half empty Cloud which I had photographed for an article and my 30ml Olympea which had been a Christmas gift.

There had been my Dior Homme in the original formulation, its lovely light iris I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to find again. There was my Infusion d’Iris - two of my irises gone in a fell swoop - and the newest bottle in my collection, Narciso Rodriguez For Her Forever, which I had worn that day and could still smell on my clothes.

There was the most loved and most used bottle in my collection, Alien, which I could never bear to take off my grab tray because I wore it so often. And next to it had been Hypnotic Poison, that miraculous Annick Menardo almond-coconut creation, and Ambre Loup, one of my favourite ambers. I should have put them both away with the rest of my winter scents, but I’d loved them too much to not have them close by.

There was my favourite Hilde Soliani, Una Tira L’altra, which had been the terminal of a years long search for my perfect cherry scent - I had bought it from a boutique in Melbourne the year before. There were my two Kyse perfumes, Frollino Lavanda and Gardenia Sucre, from an indie American house which I so cherished. The house doesn’t ship internationally anymore, so it was unlikely I’d be able to get new bottles.

Like a clean slice to my gut as I wrote it down there was Rose Flash, my favourite rose perfume in the world, an Andy Tauer miracle of an extrait that wasn’t sold on the continent anymore and that would be a fortune to order from overseas.

I had thought that was it, and wasn’t that more than enough? And then I remembered - the memory of pulling out of the cupboard and placing on the tray so clear in my mind -

Gris Clair.

The only Serge Lutens in my collection, my favourite lavender scent, the bottle it took me years of scouring ebay and perfume forums to find. One of the only discontinued bottles I owned and one I knew it would be almost impossible to replace.

I opened the notes app again and added it to the list, like a punctuation mark, like the nail in the coffin.

Gris Clair.

Stolen, lost, gone forever. Gris Clair.

I rolled over and went back to sleep.

The forensics officer was a charming, somewhat Falstaffian man who arrived mid-morning the next day.

‘Gosh,’ he said, looking around. ‘Did a number, didn’t they?’

He opened up a briefcase and dusted a fine black powder over the now empty spaces: the laptop stand on my desk, the tiny ceramic swan where I had kept coins for the laundry machine, the empty shelf where my perfumes had been.

I asked if he thought the lock on my door had been picked.

‘I could get in to that lock in thirty seconds. It’s no safer than a lock on a child’s bedroom door - and you can tell the real estate I said that.’

His conclusion was that the thieves had worn gloves, took things they thought they’d easily be able to sell, and were most likely a group of teenage girls. He said there’d been a string of similar thefts in the area and that General Duties would come around in the afternoon to take my statement.

The powder left black smears across the surface of my desk and bookshelf. He told me it’d come off with a damp cloth and some vinegar.

‘Keep an eye on Facebook Marketplace.’ He packed his briefcase and clipped it shut. ‘For the computer, and the perfumes. Facebook Marketplace is ideal for a crook. And you can tidy up if you want. General Duties won’t need to see the mess.’

He left. I locked the door, somewhat pointlessly, behind him.

I spent the next few hours cleaning ferociously, uncovering new things that had been taken as I did. There was a strange dissonance to all of this; I wondered, as I folded clothes and rolled up socks and scrubbed at the black marks with vinegar, if the teenage thieves liked the way I’d decorated my apartment. I wondered if they’d sell my stuff or keep it for themselves. I wondered if they were sitting around in a living room somewhere, spraying my perfumes.

Though I felt somewhat divorced from my body, as if all of this was psychodrama happening in a tv show as I watched from somewhere else, it appeared that life didn’t stop just because I got robbed: that day was a farewell lunch for one of my friends leaving work, and I figured there was nothing else to really do besides get ready and go.

I can’t remember what perfume I wore - I seem to remember cringing from the idea of even spraying one. My spreadsheet says I wore Wood Infusion by Goldfield and Banks.

There’s something that feels shameful about telling someone you’ve been robbed. Maybe it’s because we have a habit of internalising and thinking about what we could have done different or better in order to feel some control over a situation that is, by its nature, uncontrollable. Not wanting to make the lunch about me, I didn’t say anything as I ate my sweet potato fries and ginger ale tried not to think Gris Clair, Gris Clair, Gris Clair, because I didn’t want to start spontaneously crying.

We left the lunch and one of my friends asked me if I was alright. I tentatively explained the situation.

‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry. But,’ she brightened, ‘at least they didn’t take your perfumes!’

It is an unfortunate feeling when you know you’re about to make someone feel utterly terrible.

‘Well,’ I said, as we stood on the tram stop to head back to the office. ‘About that...’

I was approved for the house I’d been inspecting at the start of this strange odyssey, and moved out of my studio apartment later that week.

The rental company accused me of making up the robbery because I wanted to move out. I couldn’t even blame them really, given the strangeness of the situation. I passed on the forensic officer’s comments about the locks, not wanting anyone else in the apartment block to be robbed; my email was ignored.

Moving is an expensive, tiring, and time consuming business. I packed my perfumes first, and used a handful of samples I always had kicking around in my bag as I moved into the new house. Though picking my perfume every morning is a ritual that usually brings me joy, it was nice to not have to think about it for a while.

In many ways, I told myself, I was lucky. It could have been a lot worse. All I lost were things and while some of them weren’t replaceable, it was nothing I truly needed. I had my work computer. I had other hair styling tools. I had other perfumes.

Telling myself this had the very Catholic effect of compounding guilt onto a kind of grief. Not grief for the things that had been taken - though there will always be a kind of raw feeling, like running your finger across a jagged edge of torn paper, when I think of them - but a grief for the person I had been before this strange, dissociated violence had come into my life. I jumped at every small noise; I shut the blinds before the sun set; I felt tense as I tried to sleep at night, as if I was always anticipating a blow.

I checked Facebook Marketplace every day. I calculated how much it was going to cost to buy the bottles again - the ones I could buy. Everything costs more now, but that’s how the world turns. I bought home and contents insurance. I used my samples. I got used to my new commute. I looked at my list until I didn’t need to anymore because I had it memorised, like a chant or a hymn: Hypnotic Poison, Alien, Rose Flash.

Kyse, Hilde, Dior Homme.

Gris Clair, Gris Clair, Gris Clair.

People love to talk about scent memory, the Madeline moment, that magical feeling when you smell a perfume and are thrown back vividly to a time in your life when you wore it often. I looked at my list and began to worry: what if I smell them again and it makes me think about being robbed? What if every good memory I’d ever had wearing them was going to be eclipsed by this one terrible thing? The rational brain says that that’s ridiculous, but emotions don’t care about rationality and neither does your nose. What if this whole sour debacle killed the love I had for perfume entirely, this part of my identity I had chosen?

All of this was a sticky knot that was easier to feel than to express. What I could express, what I could translate, was that I had had Gris Clair and it had been taken from me, and I could never get that bottle back. The me who had worn Gris Clair was gone, and I was someone new, someone who had lost of a part of themselves, and I couldn’t get that person back either.

Let me tell you about my little wound, my Gris Clair.

Released in 2006 as one of the many collaborations between Serge Lutens and perfumer Chris Sheldrake, Gris Clair is an incense and lavender perfume that is, like all the best perfumes, both strange and beautiful.

When I first smelled it I was not optimistic: before Gris Clair, I had struggled with Serge Lutens scents. This brand is so beloved by perfume obsessives that I felt as if there was something I was missing, something lacking in my understanding of perfume as an art form because I simply couldn’t take to any Lutens I smelled. Ambre Sultan I found pedestrian, Muscs Koublai Khan too cloying, Borneo 1834 too powdery. I understood the brilliance behind them but I didn’t love any of them, and I wanted so badly to love a Serge Lutens, to find one that was mine.

The lavender is what hits you when you first spray Gris Clair. This is a herbal note, bright and sharp and camphorous, like a lavender essential oil with its edges just softened. This is in contrast to the more common lavender note in perfume, the fougere’s lavender, soft and cosy and a little cloying. Having never cared for that powdery kind of lavender, Gris Clair is the perfume that made me realise that I could indeed love this note in perfume.

What follows the lavender is what I can only call a hot ironing smell. This is the scent of steam and sizzling metal and clean fabric, like a laundry room at a fancy hotel. It’s similar to the hot ironing note in Penghaligon’s Sartorial and there are echoes of it in the sclarene note in Hermes’ H24, but none of them quite touch the pitch perfect way Sheldrake balances Gris Clair’s metallic note against the lavender so that neither one is too shrill.

The shine on a metal railing where the sun catches it; the puff of steam that dissipates in the air from a lavender diffuser; the place on a man’s wrist where the warm metal of his watch meets the cuff of his white shirt. That’s Gris Clair.

All of this is rounded out by an airy and spare incense note. There is nothing sweet or warm or comforting here but nonetheless it is a scent that embraces you, as if it is casting a strange gossamer spell. Gris Clair means light grey, and though grey is not the colour it evokes for me there is an airiness to this perfume, a lightness that keeps it from getting too overbearing even though its components are all quite intense.

The image Gris Clair vividly paints for me is of a very fancy chemist - what some may call an apothecary - that sells all kind of tinctures and aromatherapy oils and wheat bags and expensive things in tiny jars. Wearing it always made me feel like the kind of woman who would shop in one of these tiny and expensive stores as their regular pharmacy, the kind of woman who would never stoop to the discount chemist with its bright colours and sale price stickers screaming from every corner of the overstuffed aisles - so different from the person I was, but so immediately present and clear in my mind.

I smelled Gris Clair and I understood it, and because I understood it I loved it. It was, after years wandering in the perfumed desert, the Serge Lutens that I could proudly say was mine.

It took me years to find a bottle, and I remember that rush of anxiety and elation as I finally won it through an ebay auction. It was in the original bottle, with the styling Gris clair…. and though it was only two thirds full and I had paid probably too much for, it didn’t matter. I had this magical, clever, complicated and beautiful scent and could wear it whenever I wanted. I knew I’d probably never find another bottle - Serge Lutens had discontinued the perfume years ago.

It was my little perfumed miracle.

There is something in the human brain that fears change, but to me the thought that nothing lasts forever is a comfort. I like to know that there is a season for everything; I like to know, in the heat of summer, that the world will keep spinning and eventually turn cold. The months flow through time like a heartbeat: New Year’s and St Patrick’s and Easter and Halloween; summer and autumn and winter like the end of a paragraph until, at last, there’s spring. That these moments are temporary are why we love them: if every day was Christmas, there would be no Christmas at all.

The first of my stolen perfumes that I bought again was Alien. I found it on a great special and even then I was nervous as I ordered it, nervous that the formula would be different, that the bottle would be different, that I would be different, that the magic would be gone. I told myself that my relationship to these scents that I had found and learned and loved had a new and thornier facet, and I had to make my peace with the fact that there was a very real chance I wouldn’t want to wear them anymore. It had to be okay if I had had my season with the scents I’d lost, and that they might only be a part of my life as a memory.

The bottle arrived and I left it sitting for a day or two before I was brave enough to open it. There’s nothing on earth that smells like Alien, not even scents that are trying to be Alien, and something inside me unspooled as I smelled it again. It was the scent of trips to the store and morning coffee runs and workplace gossip; it was laundry cleaner musk and synthetic cedar and glimmered, kaleidoscopic jasmine.

It was my Alien. And it felt the same as it always had.

I bought Rose Flash next, trying not to think too hard about how much it cost to get it shipped from LuckyScent in the US. It smelled the same too - better, maybe, as the bottle had clearly macerated more than my original, its colour so whiskey-dark it stained the white shirt I’d been wearing as I opened it.

Slowly, where I can, when there’s a sale or I’m not buying new samples, I work my way down the list and find my bottles again, building my collection back to what it was. The bottles I can’t replace will probably always be on my list, a puncture that loses its sting as more time passes but is still, nonetheless, a wound - it heals over, but the scar remains.

It happened on a Thursday afternoon. In breaks and lulls at work I hang around fragrance forums, sample sites, and Facebook groups like the obsessive I am. Fragrance buy, swap, sell groups are not for the faint hearted - the good ones are places to make similarly minded friends and the bad ones are the closest modern equivalent to the Thunderdome.

It’s on one of these that I see it, and all the blood in my body suddenly surges like I have been put under the power of a spell:

ORIGINAL bottle. Serge Lutens Gris Clair. $240 inc. shipping. No Holds. Discontinued. PayID or Paypal F&F only. DM to request.

The price is staggering - more than double the price I paid for my original bottle, which already had the discontinued markup - but in that moment, it didn’t matter. How could anything matter but the chance to have my beloved Gris Clair in my collection once more?

The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical question that asks if an object is the same when all its parts are slowly replaced over time. It’s a paradox I think of often in the modern world of perfume, where people obsess over batch codes and reformulations and the pea under the bed that says to them, this bottle is not the same as my old bottle and I want the old bottle back. It’s a fact of life and of nature that no two batches of perfume, unless they’re entirely synthetic, will probably ever smell the same. Is corporate fallacy or the human need for constancy that frustrates us when the scent is different?

My new bottle of Gris Clair is the same ship, with new panels - or a new ship, with the panels transferred. It looks the same; it smells the same; it’s fuller than my old bottle but it has the same handsome bottle, the label reading Gris clair…. How much would you pay to smell a smell you thought you would never smell again? The answer is $240, shipping included.

The way it makes me feel is the same. But it’s also different, more layered, the sweet and the bitter infusing the lavender and the incense. If I had known the last time I’d sprayed Gris Clair I would never see that bottle again, would it have been different? Would I have enjoyed it more, savoured it - or would I have been so wracked with fear about never smelling it again that I wouldn’t spray it all?

There is no answer. There’s only the whirling possibilities, the every angle, the treading and re-treading until you stop, let the wound scab over, and step forward. At the end of the day, perfume has given me more joy from being in my life than pain over having lost it.

The ship falls apart and you build it up again - the body is hurt and scars to heal - you lose the bottle and buy another one. When I smell Gris Clair I still think about lavender and incense and elegant women in old fashioned pharmacies - but I think, too, about the ship that falls apart and is built back up again, about how time turns a wound into a scar and a scar into a hell of a story.

Most of all, I spray Gris Clair and think about the strange comfort I feel when I remember that like a perfume flaring and then fading to the drydown nothing ever stays the same, and the only constant we have is change. ◙