♣ Five Fragrances: Third Wave Gourmands

The gourmand has had a makeover; long live the gourmand.

Feb 18, 2024

The Five Fragrances series is inspired by the Five Books project, seeking to do something similar with perfume by providing five exemplary fragrances on any given theme.

Here’s a confession from deep within my soul: I don’t want to smell like a cupcake.

I am far from alone in this. There is a snobbery in the world of perfume that gourmands - perfumes with a note of sugar - are not worth serious contemplation or criticism. This is perfume for the masses, for the cheap thrill seekers, the people who have no interest venturing beyond the designer counter: we serious perfumistas may like to wear it on occasion, but no one is going to take a gourmand seriously.

This, like almost all snobbery, is utterly ridiculous.

Much like people who say they will listen to any music genre expect country and rap, perfume lovers will rave about every perfume genre except aquatics and gourmands. However, as with country and rap music, there are gems to be found if one looks in the right places. To their credit, the genre of gourmands have been evolving in their own right. Gourmand’s first wave started with Angel (Thierry Mugler, 1992) and gave us some truly great perfumes such as Lolita Lempicka (Lolita Lempicka, 1997), Hypnotic Poison (Dior, 1998), and even arguably Chergui (Serge Lutens, 2001). Gourmand’s second wave was clogged with tedious fruitchouli behemoths such as Coco Mademoiselle (Chanel, 2001) Flowerbomb (Viktor&Rolf, 2005) and La Vie Est Belle (Lancome, 2012).

As we enter gourmand’s third wave, much that has changed: the rise of niche perfume houses needing to justify a higher price tag and thus make more interesting sweet scents; a move to undo the gender stigma that sweet perfumes are only for women, leading to the unisex gourmand; and an increasing consumer demanding for creamy, lactonic perfumes as opposed to sharply sweet ones. Each of these trends are producing elegant and masterful perfumes that it would be a shame indeed not to consider just because they have a sugary base note. Below you will find a handful of gourmands that I think deserve as much consideration as do the best chypres, ambers, and fougeres.

In the words of that great rapper 50 Cent, let’s take ourselves to the candy shop.

SWEET PARMESAN VIOLET (HILDE SOLIANI, 2016)

Perfumer: Hilde Soliani (Independent)

There is a conceptually interesting argument in perfume circles that gourmand as a genre should not refer just to sugary scents but to any perfume designed to evoke food. Considering the wide gamut of perfumery, these perfumes are very few - I would not go so far as to say it is taboo to create a perfume that smells like food, but there seems to be a great hesitancy to do so from all creators ranging from Big Fragrance to indie/artisan.

Why don’t we have perfumes that smell like Caesar salad or bœuf bourguignon? The obvious answer is that there is no consumer demand for it. What in the human psyche tells us we don’t want to smell like food? It’s that feeling you get if hours after you’ve eaten a meal the taste lingers in your mouth or the scent is on your fingers, a kind of strange revulsion even when you greatly enjoyed eating in the first place.

Add to this that food scents are the most familiar to people and thus the hardest to recreate using the artifice of perfume, and it’s clear that hyper realistic food smells are a zero-sum game. There are three notable exceptions to this wide sweeping rule: fruit, alcohol, and sugar.

Of all the schools of independent perfumery, I have a special fondness for the Italians. So many Italian perfumers seem to be polymaths, artists or architects who take breaks from their substantiative jobs to dabble in perfume, and the olfactive world is so much richer for it. The queen of this movement is Hilde Soliani, a perfumer whose boldness is matched only by her skill, and who embraces the culinary to its fullest extent.

Soliani has made perfumes to evoke risotto, wine, hot milk, amaretto, lattes, chocolates, and mint liqueur. Her brilliance is in not only making these scents wearable, but in making them so hyper realistic and evocative that even if you do not have a scent memory attached to, say, the scent of wine grapes, nevertheless in spraying Lambrosc (2017) you are flung back into someone’s memory, as if she has captured in a bottle the moment of standing under a sun dappled vine.

I have many loves from Soliani’s line - Una Tira l’altra (2014) was the final destination in a long, long journey of mine to find my perfect medicinal-bite cherry scent, and Orgasmo (2013) is simply one of the finest almond perfumes ever made - but I find myself most challenged, and therefore intrigued, by Sweet Parmesan Violet (2016).

Violets occupy an interesting space in the nexus between florals and gourmands as it is a flower that you can eat. In many parts of Europe there exists the oddity that are violet pastilles, little tough balls of lavender tinted candy that taste of flowers and sugar. This treat, though I am told is loved by many, gives me the same feeling of horrified fascination that I am told others experience when they think of Australian musk sticks, which are as endemic to my childhood as birthday cakes and fairy bread.

Before modern hygiene, musk and violet pastilles were commonplace, and it’s only our modern sensibilities that baulk at these flavours being edible. (This in reverse is why it is so difficult to make a successful mint perfume - the mind always wanders to toothpaste).

In Parma they go one step further and eat the actual leaves of violets with a dusting of sugar, and this is the inspiration for Soliani’s Sweet Parmesan Violet. On first spray the scent is certainly more violet than sweet, a three dimensional floral scent saturated in shades of amethyst and aubgerine. Violets - more specifically the synthetic alpha ionone - do a lot of heavy lifting in perfumes that are designed to evoke afternoon tea parties, hatboxes, berry stained lipstick, rice powder, heart shaped jewellery, and hair braided with ribbons. If a lace doily had a smell, it would smell of violets.

Sweet Parmesan Violet does not escape this scent of the dollhouse, but neither is it limited to these parameters. Natural violets are powdery too, and it is the natural that Soliani pursues with ruthless precision. Much like Italian cuisine focuses on letting natural ingredients shine, so Sweet Parmesan Violet seeks the simplicity of realism. The trick here is that the realistic is incredibly difficult to replicate in perfume. But we have the full bodied flower here from first spray: fresh and delicate, powdery and slightly chalky, with a subtle underlying sweetness that turns your head but doesn’t sicken your stomach. A soliflore done well is always a wondrous thing, and that is what this is: perhaps the most note-true violet in modern perfume.

The thing that’s missing from the powder-puff violet perfumes of the world - many of which I love dearly - is that there’s nothing living in them. They lean heavily into the scent of dried flowers, dead flowers, a scent that is sweet and delicate but also feels dusty somehow, like the film that lands on book spines in a room someone has forgotten to clean. That future, that ending, is hinted at in Sweet Parmesan Violet, but it’s still a drydown away - a lifetime away - and the body of the perfume is of the living flower, chlorophyll rich and vibrant. It’s the smell of bright, burning, brilliant violet.

The difference between this perfume and a second wave fruitchouli gourmand is the difference between a hard candy Parma violet and petals dusted with sugar: the former feels mass produced and strangely empty, like a body brought back to life but missing its soul; the latter feels like a gift from nature, something so lovely that it is one of life’s small miracles that humans can live in a world where we’re able to see and eat and smell such a thing.

It seems to me a kind of madness to want to eat petals from flowers. But when I spray Sweet Parmesan Violet, I feel a touch of that delirium take me over, a sort of Ophelian fever, dizzying and thrilling and hued in indigo.

GARDENIA SUCRE (KYSE, 2018)

Perfume: Terri Bozzo (Independent)

My ideal white floral perfume is lush, complicated, and dripping with sinister intent, like a woman in a film noir who’s just killed her husband and has put on a feathered robe for when the detective stops by. The spare and sharp world of Diorissimo (Dior, 1956) and Chance (Chanel, 2005) isn’t for me - give me your White Diamonds (Elizabeth Taylor, 1991), your Poison (Dior, 1985), your Fracas (Piguet, 1948)

Germaine Cellier, the creator of Fracas, was a woman whose brilliance was in part due to the way her work was in constant conversation with mid-century ideas of femininity and womanhood. There is something about the indolic and bold scent of a white floral that hits on the nerve center of performining femininity more than any other. When I wear a syrupy white floral I feel almost as if I am wearing a costume, not of a woman but of the mystery of a woman, that idea so pervasive in art and culture that there is something unknowable and unreachable in a woman, some hidden knowledge, some hypnotic power. This is nonsense, of course, but admittedly the kind of feeling it is nice to be able to spray on your skin sometimes, and then later wash away.

This feeling is always lingering in the back of my mind when running my nose across a white floral. This feeling lives in Gardenia Sucre.

Like Cellier in her heyday, there is no perfumer on Earth who is doing what Terri Bozzo does. An independent American perfumer with an admirably lasered focus on gourmands, she creates olfactory concoctions like nothing I have ever smelled before. Her most famous creation is, understandably, Delizia di Marshmallow (2019), a vanilla so comprehensively good that even my cupcake-averse perfume collection has a bottle.

The wider Kyse portfolio is also well worth exploration: Bozzo has a unique talent of balancing notes with a sweet drydown so that the sugar enhances the rest of the scent rather than overpowering it. I proudly own many Kyse bottles, with their charmingly homemade labels, and like many indie houses these scents continue to macerate after purchase and become even more intense and bold. The thrill of being able to find scents like no other on the market are what draws consumers to indie houses, and in Kyse the trip is well worth it. As I made my way through the sample vials I kept on thinking I’d stumbled on my favourite, and then I reached Kyse’s gardenia.

A gardenia perfume is an incredibly difficult task to create from a technical perspective. Gardenia absolute is almost impossible to extract, so the gardenia must be an accord, and it’s very, very hard not to just use tuberose and pretend. A good two thirds of self labeled gardenia perfumes can safely, and accurately, be relabeled as tuberoses; this does not detract from their inherent quality as a perfume, but there’s something to be said for setting up a goal and then actually reaching it.

The difference between tuberose and gardenia, though both share a creamy dewiness, is that on their darker sides tuberose can smell of rubber and medicine whereas gardenia can smell like a faceful of dirt. The less pleasant aspects of florals are always the most interesting and both notes have perfumes that embrace these aspects, which make the perfumes better and the notes seem far more realistic.

Though there is nothing dirty about Gardenia Sucre, there is a pleasant earthiness humming around the edges, almost like the smell of silt in caught in petals, the kind that you would clean out of produce before cooking with it. That common experience we have of flowers in a vase out of its natural context is all well and good, but I like a flower that knows its roots: give me the dirt and the frost, the crawling bugs, the loamy soil.

Earthiness is what gives Gardenia Sucre’s eponymous note its verisimilitude, and what a punch-in-the-face gardenia it is. There seems to me no point in a half hearted indolic floral, and from the scent of this perfume Terri Bozzo agrees: this dewy floral note races out of the gate even before first spray, wafting its scent up from where drops cling to the sprayer.

The glorious and slightly disturbing tuberose note in Fracas has a buttered popcorn quality that makes you want to chew your own arm, and Gardenia Sucre has this same chewiness, like it has been made of gardenia petals that have been preserved in sugar that you could snack on like potato chips. But the sweetness, though radiantly present, is not sharp or screeching. Instead it has a lactonic sweetness like flavoured milk, which reinforces the creaminess of the gardenia itself.

This perfume combines the blurring aspect of abstract perfumery, where every note blends together to create a newer and more interesting scent, with the power of a soliflore that champions a single central note. It is as if the blooming, cream-petalled gardenia is the simmering sun and all the other notes the planets drawn into its gravity, a entire moving solar system spinning to life on your skin.

I couldn’t tell you what floral materials Terri Bozzo used to create Gardenia Sucre - it could be tuberose absolute, a combination of accords and bases, a C02 extract, or the most realistic synthetics on the market. But I can tell you that smelling Gardenia Sucre makes my heart soar. The technical feat of it is so astounding that it distracts me for those first five minutes. If I consider it objectively, I know that Gardenia Sucre would be nightmarish to those who don’t like syrupy white florals or sugary notes, but I am so enamoured with this perfume that is hard for me to comprehend that anyone could dislike it at all.

Perfume is many things, from the banal to the sublime, but perhaps most of all it is intent: in perfume you have the ability to choose how to smell, the olfactive power to determine your mood, your confidence, your attitude, your day. Don’t you want to spray a perfume and feel like that murderess on the stairs in her feathers, just a little? Don’t you want to spray your perfume in the morning and go about your day feeling like you’re plotting revenge in a Hayez painting, sinister and lovely all at once?

How wonderful, then, that there are perfumes like Gardenia Sucre to choose from, a magic potion in a bottle that can turn you, in the second it takes to put your finger on the nozzle, into someone entirely new.

WHITE MADERA (OMNIA PROFUMI, 2015)

Perfumer: Fabrizio Tagliacarne (Independent)

There’s a memory from my childhood, hazy and blurred at the edges, of holiday visits to an old fashioned candy store. This store is wood paneled and covered wall to wall in glass cabinets and jars filled with every confectionery imaginable: chocolate truffles and boysenberry fudge, coconut ice and peach bon bons, peanut brittle and orange peel. Though there was a cornucopia of all things tiny and delicate and sugared, the smell of the licorice section was so strong that it had escaped the confines of its glass cabinet to softly perfume the entire store, like a mist of anise that swirled around your ankles.

Even as a child I knew that this was a special place, fancy, much fancier than the normal candy aisle at the supermarket. The smell of this place, this memory, is so immediate to me that I am struck with it whenever I smell a perfume with a licorice note, but I have never encountered it as strongly as I did in White Madera.

There are many commonplace ways in which we encounter that peculiar sweet-bitter aroma of aniseed - star anise, especially when it used as a spice at Christmastime; tarragon, with its bright herbaceousness; the peppery-crisp bite of fennel - but pairing anise with sugar will immediately evoke licorice. I have a great fondness for bitter flavours and scents, both in food and perfume, but have to confess I am the person who sorts the licorice jellybeans away from the rest in the packet: there is something about the leathery chew of the stuff that does not sit well with me. The boldness of a licorice note make it difficult to use in perfumery - like in that candy store in my childhood, it has a tendency to dominate every note around it.

When I first sprayed White Madera, it was one of those happy surprises that occur when I haven’t researched something before smelling it. Having smelled other scents from this Italian house, I expected a creamy-vanilla base - and expected to be bored by it - but straight out of the bottle that anise was there, giving this scent its defining characteristic and holding its ground against what is indeed a vanillic drydown.

Not all vanillas are the same and it’s quite easy to smell a good one from a bad. At the niche price point - White Madera costs $299AUD for 100ml - there is really no excuse for a vanilla note that is shrill or scratchy or alcoholic. White Madera uses the same clever method smelled in Hypnotic Poison by buffeting its vanilla with coconut and then setting both notes at a simmer so that instead of smelling of cake pops or suntan lotion the effect is of an expensive and luxurious box of licorice allsorts, the kind that come in winsome tins that always seem to show up in gift shops at Christmas.

On first spray White Madera is complex, a touch powdery, and the kind of sophisticated gourmand that is impossible to ignore. But the test with a gourmand is always, always in the drydown. There’s something about vanillas that, somewhere around hour five, gets absolutely unbearable. What may have been a pleasant visit to the candy store in the opening gets overwhelming by the drydown, a total sugar crash, the olfactory equivalent of that ache you get if you eat ice cream too quickly.

White Madera keeps its soft murmur for at least eight hours, and though it does get sweeter the coconut and vanilla balance one another so that the scent softly fades, like colour into sepia. This perfume feels sophisticated. This is a loaded word in perfume - sophisticated is seen as an endorsement and crass as a pejorative - but they are simple descriptors: I know many sophisticated perfumes I think are dull, and own full bottles of scents many would call crass.

White Madera is sophistication done well, and doubly so because it uses vanilla, which is a decidedly unsophisticated note. There’s a sense in this perfume of something to indulge in, something you don’t always buy or wear but when you do you cherish it: the gift box that only comes out at Christmas; the old fashioned candy store you visit on your holiday.

In Corinthians, there is a line of verse that hits me in my gut: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

When I go to a candy store now, those little apothecaries with wooden shelves and glass jars and chocolate truffles, it isn’t the same. Still lovely, yes, still a joy, because they aren’t different: it’s me who is different. It’s me who has aged out of that time in your life when being able to buy some candy from a fancy store is the only thing you need to make you happy. Childhood is the garden we are thrown out of and can never return to, and soon what was once treacled becomes a little more like licorice, the sweet and the bitter entwined.

But the store smells like it always did, too - dark, fine cocoa; hard boiled peppermint; bittersweet twists of anise. I smell that smell of simple joy, and I remember, and for a moment - for as long as White Madera’s drydown will last - I can find the place inside me where I put it away and embrace this tender, childish thing.

BAKE (AKRO, 2023) & DEVOTION (DOLCE&GABBANA, 2023)

Perfumer: Olivier Cresp (Bake - Independent; Devotion - Firmenich)

If you’re looking for a best in show third wave gourmand, it’s hard to walk past the man who invented the genre.

The internet has done for perfume what it has done for every other interest on earth: centralised widespread enthusiasts into a small and fanatical community. For perfume this also meant the creation of consumer base that is highly informed and willing to pay a lot of money for a brand they’ve maybe never heard of. This, in turn, has lead many classically trained French perfumers to open their own houses, sometimes whilst still working for big fragrance firms.

One of these is Olivier Cresp, the creator of Angel and Light Blue (Dolce&Gabbana, 2001), who opened his house Akro with his daughter in 2018. But he’s also still working for Firmenich, which has lead to the oddity that is Bake (Akro, 2023) and Devotion (Dolce&Gabbana, 2023): two lemon perfumes that are the same lemon perfume.

Lemon, along with coffee and cinnamon, is for my money one of the hardest notes to do well in perfumery. You can get quite a note-true lemon in perfume - though I think there’s something of that sour zing of fresh lemon juice missing - but due to the note’s overuse in cleaning products for about fifty years you smell it and the mind is automatically drawn to floor cleaner.

Other citruses, most notably bergamot, are more prevalent in fine fragrance because they are less harsh and more aromatic. There are big lemon perfumes out there, notably Light Blue, but there’s always something scrubby about them, like the way your skin on your hands gets dry and squeaky after you’ve been washing dishes.

All facets of lemon that could be considered even slightly sour or sharp have been expunged from the lemon-vanilla accord that forms the heart of Bake and Devotion. It’s almost a lemon essence, undeniably citrus but almost like it’s two steps removed from the actual fruit. The risk here is that it could lean too artificial, but Cresp is too clever for that - in both perfumes the lemon is paired with a soft and creamy vanilla.

In smelling both Bake and Devotion I found myself most surprised about all the things they weren’t: not sharp or harsh from the lemon, not powdery or saccharine from the vanilla. There is a beautiful balance here that does give a feeling of an expensive lemon cake, butter-pat yellow and gleaming in a patisserie window. Both perfumes list fantasy dessert notes - panna cotta and praline - and these feel earned and not ambitious.

There is something in Bake and Devotion, as I think is perhaps the aspiration of all gourmands, that feels comforting to wear. This is why sugary scents are some of the only food scents that we like as perfume: for so many of us there is an olfactory association with positive feelings, the treat at the end of the night, the pancakes on a Saturday morning. That cosiness is very hard to achieve, but Cresp does it with customary panache.

If I was a perfumer and worked to create a lemon accord that did not smell like floor cleaner and instead smelled like a lemon meringue pie, I would also want to put it in as many perfumes as possible. This is my best explanation for why Cresp released Bake from his own brand Akro, and then Devotion for Dolce&Gabbana in the same year when they both center on the same creamy lemon accord. One is niche and the other designer and their price points reflect this, though the delightfully gaudy sacred heart on the D&G bottle does sway me more than the minimalist packaging on the Akro.

The key difference between the two, and it is a small one, is that the heart of Devotion has a light floracy to it. It’s an orange blossom note, which pulls double duty by adding to the citrus feel of the fragrance and reinforcing the sweetness because orange blossom always smells a bit like Froot Loops. This feels like what it is: a concession to the expectations of a designer brand. Bake is pure gourmand with nothing to contrast, but then again it doesn’t need it: the lemon is the contrast against the sweetness, a harmony on its own.

In pondering Bake and Devotion on twin blotters in front of me, it’s apparent that their lack of projection is part of why they are so successful. Both scents are strong - I threw a blotter of Devotion into my bag after smelling it in store, and got a lovely waft of lemon panna cotta for days afterwards every time I reached in to grab my purse - but not loud, which helps to avert any feelings of industrial strength cleaners.

Devotion and Bake show that there is an untapped reservoir of innovation possible in the gourmand genre. We can only hope that Cresp continues to prove to his peers that it is possible to create a genuinely moving gourmand. The further we go from the nadir of overbearing sugar notes, the more we see the kind of intelligent perfumery that will ensure the gourmand will take its place as a legitimate artistic genre in the great pantheon of perfume.

Dismiss at your peril. ◙

HOUSEKEEPING

All prices are accurate to the Australian dollar as at 18 February 2024.

I’m hoping to do another Q&A article in a few weeks! If you have any questions please submit them here or in the comments below.

If you are interested in more of my writing on perfume, here is my deep dive on niche house Le Labo and here is my long read on Baccarat Rouge 540. I write other articles such as this one on this Substack, and can be found talking about perfume on twitter and Instagram.