I Want To Smell Like A Fairy Tale

Newsletter #11: perfumes for the deep, dark woods

When I was a child I had a hardcover book of fairy tales. It had a girl in a dress with a red cape on the front; the spine was covered in vines.

To say I loved this book is an understatement. There was a time where I took it with me everywhere. I would sit in the corner of the room - every room - and read. I read those stories until the book’s spine started falling apart and the vines fell to ruin. I loved it until I broke it.

The things we love as children take up a strange real estate in our minds. I suppose they stick around the longest because they got in there first, before adolescence, before your frontal cortex really develops. Though I was equally impacted by Disney films and their version of fairy tales, it’s the older and stranger ones that I loved then and still love now.

It’s a very gothic thing, a fairy tale. They are folk memories and oral stories passed from generation to generation, mainly from women to women. Fairy tales tap into what feels like the deep undercurrents of humanity: sensuality, power dynamics, morals and taboos. Stories like Bluebeard and Red Riding Hood are endlessly adapted, referenced, and satirised because they speak to us in every era they pass through.

When I was a teenager, I sought out fairy tales everywhere. I inhaled books like The Bloody Chamber and poems like Goblin Market and films like Donkey Skin. I loved the timeless setting of these stories, the worlds they constructed, the little village and the vast forest. The universal nature of a fairy tale means that you approach it differently as you move through life. When I was a child the image of a girl in a red cape and a hungry wolf seemed terrifying; when I got older, it seemed a little different.

Now that I’m all grown up, I feed the craving for fairy tales by exploring folk stories from other cultures. I didn’t grow up with these stories - they’re not living in the part of my brain that’s now hard-set - but I recognise them anyway. The beats of the stories are the same as the ones I know so well - East of the Sun, West of the Moon; Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf; The Unmannerly Tiger. There’s always darkness; there’s always magic and violence. There are always the woods, and they are always dark and deep.

No matter how old I am or what culture they come from, I love fairy tales. I love them so much that I want to smell like one.

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Wanting to find a scent that smells like a feeling is probably the most frustrating think you can do to yourself in the fragrance world. You don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.

Fairy tales are almost entirely aesthetic, so it’s not surprising that they’re a fairly common motif in the world of perfume that relies so heavily on evoking emotions. Look long enough at the perfume counter and you’ll see the fantastical everywhere: the dripping tuberose and apple-shaped bottle of Poison seems designed to sit on the vanity of the Evil Queen; the sweet violet Lolita Lempicka could be the apple the Queen gives to Snow White.

Think of your favourite fairy tale character and you’ll find a perfume inspired by them. I fill my perfume sample drawers with these scents, mostly from indie houses, inspired by witches and dragons and Baba Yaga in her pestle.

I think that fairy tales are easy to call on in perfume because they are worlds that only exist in the imagination, so there’s no comparative. You can’t turn around and say that something doesn’t accurately depict a hut on chicken’s legs.

Unfortunately for me, a fairy tale perfume that doesn’t match the exact image I have in my head evokes the same feeling as when the actor in the film version doesn’t match the image you have of your favourite character from the book. I love the dark fairy tales, the fucked up ones, the ones where the evil stepmother has to dance in hot shoes as punishment. The violence, I feel, is part of the point; the story is better and the meaning deeper because the stakes are so high.

So my ideal fairy tale perfume has the same contrast as the fairy tale itself: the princess, the castle, the dresses and the magic, but also the dark woods, the evil sorcerer, the wolf at the door. This contrast is also common enough in perfumery - a light floral that bounces off a deep woody note - beauty and the beast.

I also want the feeling of nature in a fairy tale perfume. I’m afraid to say the modern perfume zeitgeist is not fable adjacent. The only other world that a vanilla sugar bomb or odious Sauvage imitator is going to evoke is one of sweaty nightclubs and existential dread.

Beyond that, I don’t know what I am looking for - I only know that I want it. I want the fairy tale perfume of my dreams. I haven’t found it yet, but I wanted to talk about a few perfumes that have come close.

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Fille en Aiguilles - Serge Lutens

There are some perfumes in the fragrance community that are spoken of with such reverence that you feel like you simply must smell them. Fille en Aiguilles is one such scent - considered by many to be the best perfume from one of the greatest perfume brands on the market. I hunted for a decant of this perfume for years before finally getting my hands on it. The anticipation had me nearly shaking as I opened the package.

And then I sprayed it.

Don’t get me wrong - Fille en Aiguilles is a beautiful perfume. But it is not a perfume I would ever want to wear. I had been interested in the scent because - well, first of all, I was influenced by everyone else saying how good it was - but mostly because of its pine note.

Pine is a note that has a bad reputation. This is because, about sixty years ago, the functional fragrance companies decided to make it the smell of cleaning products, so now it tends to remind people of mopping their floors. Pine needles have large quantities of turpenes, an aromatic compound also found in rosemary and lavender. This is what gives pine its sharp, medicinal bite. As a lover of all things phenolic and turpenic, there’s a special place in my heart for pine perfumes.

And the pine in Fille en Aiguilles is truly gorgeous. Because this note is usually more subdued in perfume (one presumes to avoid the mopped-floor feeling), it punches twice as hard when it’s allowed to prowl around unsupervised. The rough edges of pine are so confronting, sharp and dry but also rich and verdant, that they immediately throw you miles deep into the forest.

This is good. This is what we want. I spent the first half an hour of Fille en Aiguilles in the raptures of that pine note, thinking about magic spells, The Company of Wolves. And then the perfume’s heart, a boozy soaked raisin accord, got bigger and bigger. Soon it overpowered the pine to become the perfume’s main character, supported by a typically Lutensian incense drydown.

All of this reinforces the fairy tale feeling of the perfume. We must not look at goblin men; We must not buy their fruits - there is beauty in this perfume’s deep unease. There is something harsh and strange and magical about Fille en Aiguilles, but by the time it reaches the drydown I know I cannot ever love it. Sweet scents, even the handsomely drawn raisin note here, are multiplied tenfold on my skin and turn everything saccharine.

Even though Fille en Aiguilles was not my flavour of magic, it is still a magical perfume. You should smell it if you can - as I still do sometimes, when I want to feel like I am sitting on the edge of that endless forest.

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Ormonde Woman - Ormonde Jayne

Something I didn’t realise until I was an adult was that so many of the fairy tales I love are stories where women drive the plot. Janet in Tam Lin defying her father and then the Fairy Queen to chase what she loves; Gerda journeying to confront the Snow Queen; even Little Red has agency in her own way. It is easy to imagine these stories being shared from grandmothers and mothers to their daughters.

There’s a lot of evil women in fairy tales too, which is delightful in its own way. Though this can sometimes feel like the same tired dichotomy - innocent princess or wicked witch - I think the magic of fairy tales is that you can, and do, relate to both archetypes. Because they exist to reflect different parts of you. Sitting on the cusp between them is Ormonde Woman.

Ormonde Jayne is an interesting little brand. Founded by Linda Pilkington in the early 2000’s, this is a niche house that creates sophisticated scents for the sophisticated woman. They have always seemed to me to be a brand targeting women who would typically buy Chanel but are looking for something with more personality.

And personality these scents have in spades - though they’re still fancy enough to make you feel like you need to wear business casual when you spray them. There’s a lot of good perfumes in the line, but the one I own and the one I love is their first scent, Ormonde Woman.

The perfume claims to use the rare material ‘black hemlock’, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. What this translates to is a magically radiant pine note that quickly becomes addictive the more that you smell it. It’s apparent on first spray, this witchy as hell note, that has the trademark bite of pine but also a green sort of spiciness, like someone’s has basted an allspice-clove blend onto pine cones.

The scent is, structurally, a chypre - though in the loosest possible terms. Most of the perfume is playing supporting choir to that beautiful black hemlock, though you can smell a petal-dew purple violet in the heart.

The base is quite simply probably the best use of iso-e super you will ever smell. (The scent’s perfumer, Geza Schoen, would go on to create Escentric Molecules). Here the synthetic is used as it was Platonically intended to be, radiating every other note and giving them a soft projection and warmth. The pencil-shavings cedar of the iso e triples down on the rest of the scent’s woody warmth.

It’s the forest-but-not-quite feeling of Ormonde Woman that scratches that fairy tale itch in my head. In fairy tales all the colours are brighter but the world is two dimensional: instead of a village or a huntsman there is only the village and the huntsman. A fairy tale is a bottled universe and Ormonde Woman is the same - reflecting reality but distorting it too.

The perfume would not work without iso e super, but of course this is the only burr in the shoe for me - it is simply too modern a smell. But I own a bottle and love it dearly, though its longevity to my nose is a little fleeting.

I am not usually the type to see people in perfumes. I don’t buy or wear a perfume because it smells like the kind of woman I want to be. But sometimes I do see a glimpse of a person in a perfume, just a shade, and I like to think they are looking back at me too. The person hiding in Ormonde Woman might be a hero or a princess or an evil queen, or all of them, or none. But she is interesting, this Ormonde Woman. She’s difficult in the most intriguing way.

Treat it like a spell in a story: spray Ormonde Woman three times, hold up a mirror, and see what stares back at you.

Fathom V - Beaufort London

Fairy tales are primarily stories for children that are meant to convey a kind of ancestral knowledge. It’s only a matter of time before every child learns that there are things hiding in the woods and in the dark. Fairy tales, in their own fantastical way, can be touchstones to the hardest things a human of any age can comprehend: death, violence, grief, abandonment, loss. Not just the fucked up fairy tales, either - there’s plenty of darkness that sticks around for even the Disney versions, because darkness is tension and tension is story.

There is more of the bittersweet spectrum of life in fairy tales than I understood when I was a child. The last place on earth that I expected to see such a feeling reflected was in Beaufort London’s Fathom V.

Beaufort are what I would classify as a funky little niche brand. Their nondescript bottles hide absolutely monstrous scents. This is the kind of sturm und drang perfume that irradiates the air around you and will earn you stern looks if sprayed in store (I speak, painfully, from experience). These are big, punchy perfumes, but are more considered and better made than the majority of niche offerings.

All that being said, I wasn’t particularly itching to smell Fathom V. Though I love the name’s homage to The Tempest, the scent is meant to be an aquatic which is one of my least favourite genres of perfume.

Happily either the scent has been mislabelled or the brand is trying to be subversive, as the scent isn’t really an aquatic at all. There is a wet-soil accord that is immediate upon first spray, but there’s too much dirt in it to be truly watery.

Wet dirt perfumes - as opposed to petrichor perfumes, which do skew aquatic - always feel very Gothic to me. There’s something about that tilled-earth smell that evokes the macabre. Smelling a wet dirt perfume always feel as if you are walking past a freshly dug grave.

In the typical Beaufort style there’s about fifty other things happening in this perfume too. It’s really best to spray and let the thing settle for a minute or ten before you even attempt to sniff. Once the initial screaming has settled down you are left with a strange and lovely wet earth and white flowers perfume. This is an odd but not unknown perfume structure - it’s reminiscent of Myths Woman from Amouage and a tiny tin of Death and Decay from Lush that I drained to the dregs as a teenager.

Given the graveyard feeling, the obvious choice would be to centre a lily note. But Fathom V is cleverer than that - its dominant floral note is ylang-ylang. Typically found in blousy, suntan lotion perfumes, it is almost overripe here. That decadence is the point - the fullness of the floral against the sharp bitterness of the wet earth always sits on the cusp of nauseating.

The scent dries down to a pleasant incense-patchouli hum after about three days on blotter and whenever you wash it off on skin. For the wrong person Fathom V will be so uncomfortable that it could astral-project you into your own funeral; for the gothic minded who have been searching for that very feeling their whole life, I heartily recommend it.

It is a dark feeling that Fathom V gives me. But it is indulgent, and in a strange way almost safe, as if you are given the freedom to explore these feelings through the vehicle of the perfume. And it is that feeling that bound Fathom V to fairy tales for me, because they serve the same purpose. If you met a handsome stranger on the road who wanted to eat you alive, you’d run the other way in fear; but in the story you can you wonder what if I didn’t want to run? What then?

There is a part of all of us that wants to run, and a part of us that wants to give in. To hold so many conflicting and bizarre feelings inside of you all at once is part of being human. It is the reason why we can create fairy tales and it’s the reason we can make perfume.

It’s comforting to me to read a story or smell a perfume that reveals a new feeling, a puzzle to solve. I am a stranger to myself, and I can slip between worlds as easily as wearing a donkey skin. ▣