On a recent trip to Sydney I followed my usual tradition of swinging by the big department stores to have a good old sniff. Unfortunately it was a boiling hot day and the air conditioning in the store had broken. I shared a humid moment of commiseration with a salesperson at the Guerlain counter as I sprayed Tobacco Honey and she crouched in front of an oscillating fan holding her hair off her neck.
Needless to say it was a much quicker trip than usual, but I did take time to stop by the Balmain counter and smell their newly released Les Eternels line. This collection is part of a fascinating movement in perfumery, that of reviving classic lines and houses. We've seen other examples of this with brands like Bienaime, Caron, and Maison Violet, and with lines like Estee Lauder's Legacy Collection.
I have to admit, I am somewhat unsure who these revival projects are for. The target audience would naturally be the vintage fragrance aficionado. But as I am one I feel safe in saying that they are one of the snobbiest and hardest to please groups of people on earth, whose first reaction to a revived classic is to shudder and retreat into their crypts, muttering curses.
In today's regulated climate it is simply not possible to recreate a vintage perfume with any level of accuracy. This isn't a pejorative, just a fact, and there's a lot of amazing work being done at the big houses to reformulate classic scents into something wonderfully reminiscent but also firmly modern - see Guerlain's work on Mitsouko. And there's plenty of fantastic modern perfumes that evoke a vintage feeling, like scents from houses like Bogue, Papillion, and Eris.
The tension of things smelled different than they used to has always existed in modern perfume, and reviving a classic scent that smells utterly foreign to the people who once loved it only seems to lead to distress and frustration.
However, if I was a brand who owned the copyright to iconic names like Joy or Pour un Homme, I'd probably keep reviving them too. Like a beloved film franchise that keeps getting zapped into production once again, there's money to made from the old greats of perfume. And so we come to the 2024 revival of Balmain's Vent Vert.
When it comes to classics of perfumery, it is hard to walk past any of Germaine Cellier's work. Cellier is one of the giants of the industry, a woman whose life was as interesting and as complicated as the perfumes she created. She worked in the mid 20th century, when perfumers took their time and tended to only have a handful of scents to their name. But what a resume: Vent Vert, Madame Jolie, Bandit, Fracas.
Cellier worked for Roure (the company that would merge into the modern Givaudan), and her scents are notoriously hard to recreate as she was known to use 'bases' - premixed accords - rather than listing out individual materials.
Cellier was also fond of an overdose. She knew that one of the great sleight-of-hands in perfumery is to slug a huge whallop of a material into a perfume so that all the other notes are heightened, either fighting the overdose or enhanced by it. In Vent Vert, Cellier famously overdoses galbanum, a bitterly green resin that gives the scent its trademark intensely grassy and dry structure.
Cellier's overdoses have the power of associating her perfumes with that one huge note. The perfume literate will always think 'Vent Vert' when they smell galbanum. You would think this would make it simple to reformulate her scents, but quite the opposite; the overdose note is easy to recreate, it's the rest of it that gets you.
Perfumes are 'reformulated' all the time - tweaked here and there to account for price changes or supply issues with materials, variance in quality, or simply because the company wants to. Vent Vert has had three big Reformulations across the course of its lifetime. The first was in 1991 (okay), the second in 1999 (bad), and the third in 2024 (to be determined). Calice Becker has been involved in all three, and one thing that has stayed consistent with Vent Vert is that is has always been a Givaudan perfume.
I admire a perfumer willing to take up a challenge, but for my money there's maybe no job in fine fragrance I would want less than to reformulate a classic. It's a zero sum game: the perfume will always exist in comparison to the original and you're never going to be able to capture that original magic again. Anything you create will upset purists and confuse newcomers.
The original Vent Vert was released by Balmain in 1947. The earliest formula I have smelled is from the 1960's, so probably not identical to the original but still pretty close.
When you smell a vintage perfume and know when it was released, it feels natural to think it smells of its context. For Vent Vert that would mean post war France, the world recovering and hurtling towards the 50's and the New Look. But this is the magic of Cellier's work - when you smell Vent Vert it is almost without context - it lives entirely in its own world.
Vent Vert was the first great green perfume. To me, a decent a green perfume will always smell a bit witchy. Though almost all perfumes evoke the natural in some way green perfumes are the ones that feel the least civilised and therefore the most supernatural.
I think it's because green perfumes are not pretty. Every green note, from galbanum to fig leaf to basil, is jagged and sharp and almost squeaky, like skin that has been scrubbed clean. They can be icy, like lily of the valley, or earthy, like vetiver, but that that cut-grass chlorophyll verdancy is always there, a smell so much older and stranger than us; the smell of earth before humanity; the smell of Eden.
It is this feeling that surrounds you when you smell Vent Vert.
A notes list isn't helpful for this perfume as there's so much happening within it. The broad movements of the scents are these: a bracing and bitter green galbanum opening flares and fades into a lush and deeply beautiful rose-jasmine floral heart, before fading into the kind of powdery styrax-oakmoss drydown. That drydown makes you a bit emotional, because you simply can't build a perfume to fade away like that in the modern world anymore.
Vent Vert is the kind of perfume that does away with the modern notion that everyone in the past had lives that were smaller, simpler, more conservative than our own: this perfume is a massive, complex, raw and growling thing. It is so immense it makes our perfumed landscape look miniscule, like looking down on fields from an airplane.
Instead of using its vegetal notes to make a floral heart crispier, sharper, more alive, there is nothing here to reinforce but itself. Vent Vert constantly folds back onto its own greenness, like a tomb of green, no other colours or feelings to be found. But it is not overpowering or paranoia-inducing because everything here has had the volume turned down to a pleasant hum. There is a difference between a loud perfume and a powerful perfume, and Vent Vert is the latter - it does not need to scream to make its point.
Vent Vert is distinct from the sharp green chypres of the 1970's that it would inspire. Where Aromatics Elixir and Chanel no 19 are the too-bright light, the screeching voice, that initial icy blast of walking into a refrigerated room, Vent Vert is a murmur, the soft spongy forest floor of green above a loamy soil. Perfume, in the grander scale, can be viewed as attempt by humanity to harness nature and warp it to our own ends. Vent Vert is a battle in this ongoing war that knows its greatest victory is in surrender.
For me Vent Vert conjures an Old-World forest that is temperate and cool, not the humid oppressiveness of a rainforest. There’s almost a fairy-tale quality to this forest, an unreality related to its perfection. The air is crisp and vines curl around the roots of trees so tall they almost form a skyline of green. This is a forest of dreams, not of baser human realities.
In The Green Knight (2021) and the poem it is based on, the Arthurian hero Gawain must journey from Camelot to the Green Chapel to confront the mysterious Green Knight. The Green Knight, or the Green Man, is a motif that is old, ancient, older than Arthur and his legends, older than even Christianity.
The Green Knight’s role in the Arthurian cycle represents many things: the clash between nature and civilisation, the tension the waxing Christianity and waning paganism, the conflict between man’s natural instincts and notions of chivalry and order. The Green Knight can represent so many things because he is an eternal and ever evolving figure who represents nature - both its beauty and its terror.
As Gawain travels further and further from civilisation and deeper into nature, the more the rules that defined his world unravel. His journey from Camelot to the Green Chapel is like a katabasis, the classic Greek descent into the Underworld. As the world grows wilder around him, it is the rules and order of humanity that seem to be out of place.
What good is it to be a knight in a natural world that knows no kings?
When Gawain finally reaches the The Green Chapel, the set piece is structured like a church that has crumbled into ruin and been reclaimed by nature. There is green everywhere, vines and moss and overgrowth. But a ghost of the church that was can still be seen, windows and walls and a doorway. It is man and nature both, a place built by humans and reclaimed by an ancient force, the cycle that never stops turning.
I think the scent of Vent Vert would linger in the corners of that chapel. I think its galbanum and rose and oakmoss sillage would hang thick in the air of that church in the morning, when the sun is still low and the creatures of the earth are stirring.
It is easy to think of humanity as something apart from nature, with our cities and our highways and our supermarkets. But when you smell Vent Vert, the Green Knight is with you. Nature subsumes you. And like Gawain you remember for a moment that it is from the earth you came and it is to earth that you will, one day, return.
Intimidating, indeed, to try and recreate a perfume as incredible as all that. And when I smelled the 2024 Vent Vert, it was of course not the original - but nor did I expect it to be. What I smelled, however, was interesting - because it did give me a touch of that witchy green magic, that vine-covered doorknocker in the shape of the Green Man.
The ghost of Cellier's Vent Vert is haunting this new, and undoubtedly smaller, perfume. The 2024 Vent Vert keeps that sharp green opening so characteristic of the original perfume, but tempers it with a more modern fig leaf note. This could be for a dozen reasons - cost and restrictions on galbanum being the two that come immediately to mind - but no matter, as fig leaf is a note that keeps that sharp verdancy that the perfume’s structure calls for.
The scent’s heart is much changed, no longer that radiant and complicated floral and more a linear jasmine-tinged thing. The drydown, understandably, is completely different, a synthetic oakmoss with plenty of musks.
Cellier’s Vent Vert it is not, but on its own two feet it is a well made perfume, and its sharp green opening is delightfully unfashionable to modern tastes. This to me might be the most Cellier-esque thing about it, as she’s always seemed to me to be someone who told people what was fashionable, rather than being dictated to herself.
The new Vent Vert is a well made modern green pseduo-chypre, much more successful than Malle’s Synthetic Jungle but not quite as whip-crackingly clever as Eris Parfums’ Green Spell.
Smell the original Vent Vert if you can; if you can't, smell the newer version anyway. If it is spring where you are, walk outside and smell the new flowers blooming; if it is autumn, smell the leaves as they turn brittle and dry. You had forgotten him for a moment, The Green Knight, so walk outside and smell the foliage and remember.
He will always be there. He will always be waiting for you. â—™
