The Easy Reach

Newsletter #10: perfume you don't have to decide on

It is my joy and my passion to treat perfume as a complex and literate thing. For me the Platonic ideal of a perfume should have depth and complexity and movement. A perfume should have a three act structure like a good play, with guns hung on the wall in the opening that aren't fired until the drydown.

But perfumes, like plays, can come in simple and perfect one act structures too.

A comment I hear often from people who have a signature scent - one perfume, and one perfume only, that they wear each and every day - is that it's simple.

'I don't have to think about it,' they say. 'It's my perfume and that's what I spray.'

This can be understood through the lens of decision fatigue - the theory that our brains only have a finite amount of choices it can make in a day before we hit a mental wall and are completely exhausted. It's the same thinking that leads people to have a closet full of the same outfit in different colours - a sort of uniform, the same thing every day, no thought needed. A choice saved.

I'm too maximalist for any of that. I've got a big wardrobe and a big perfume collection and I find great joy in wasting some of my decisions on what I'm going to wear and how I'm going to smell. For me this choosing scratches a sort of creative itch in my brain - it's like constructing a feeling, a persona you can try out for the day like Cinderella going to the ball.

But there are days when even I get tired, or I'm late, or I’m stressed, or I just don't want to think quite so much. And those are the days I go for the easy reach.

How to describe the easy reach perfume? This is a scent that is, for want of a better word, uncomplicated. An easy reach perfume is a perfume that is not going to demand your attention throughout the day. It still smells good and you still feel good wearing it, but it is not the kind of huge, complex, sprawling thing that is snapping its fingers in front of your face.

You know this perfume like you know all the words to a beloved song: there are no surprises waiting here, but that is the point. When you have them long enough your easy reach perfumes become old friends: dependable, reliable, and not too concerned if you don't look their way for months at a time.

Below are four perfumes in my collection that I spray on days when I need the comfort of a story I have read many, many times. My easy reaches - my dear old friends.

---

R.E.M - ARIANA GRANDE

In a perfume culture that sees new dupe houses spring up every day, there's something reassuring about Ariana Grande perfumes.

Sure the line is blatant plagiarism, but they plagiarise in the traditional way, the same as perfume houses have been doing for decades - and the bottles are cute too. Like a group of medieval guilds constantly competing with one another the big oil houses have always stolen each other’s ideas, tweaking a note or an accord here or there to offer something new but different to the market.

Perfume, like beauty, is an industry that traditionally works in a trickle-down fashion: the luxury houses will release a pillar perfume and everyone from their competitor houses to the budget lines at the chemist will come out with an imitation. This is a method that has worked for decades on the assumption that the luxury buyer and the budget buyer are two discrete markets.

But they need not be. The Ariana Grande line is clearly targeted to teens and young adults, but the perfumes are hiding the most brilliant celebrity scents since the early 2000's in their comical bottles.

I own three Ariana perfumes: Cloud, R.E.M, and God is a Woman. I wear them frequently, both on their own and layered with other scents, and enjoy the hedonistic thrill of spraying them in abundance as I know I don't need to be precious about how much they cost or whether I'll be able to find a bottle to repurchase.

R.E.M is, first and foremost, a lavender perfume. Lavender is the perfect note for a cheap formula because it's relatively inexpensive and smells damn good with basically no adjustments or alterations. (Unless, like my sister, you are someone who thinks that lavender smells like cheap hairspray). The problem with lavender is that many people assosciate it with their grandmothers, and perfume conglomerates strongly believe that nobody wants to smell like their grandmothers.

In proof that trends truly are a cycle, lavender in women's perfume has been having a renaissance in the past decade with scents like Libre (YSL) and Mon Guerlain (Guerlain). R.E.M is cashing in on the trend, but as a formula is specifically 'inspired' by Coffee Break (Margiela Replica), a perfume that smells nothing like coffee and a lot like lavender and milk.

I like the structure of Coffee Break but it always comes across too faint and wan for the Margiela price point. R.E.M remedies this by being both dirt cheap and stacked with the typical celebrity scent overdose of intense white musks, which make it last for at least half the day.

R.E.M is a lavender gourmand whose sweet note is listed as 'zefir', a kind of fruit puree meringue dessert from the Soviet Union. What this delicious word salad of a note means is that instead of being the screechy-sharp ethyl maltol caramel note one expects from a cheap gourmand, R.E.M has a softer and more rounded tonka bean and marshmallow creaminess. You need this pillowy soft tonka and white musk to act as a sort of bouncy landing ground for the sharp, jagged medicinal bite of lavender. The overall effect, like a pavlova piled high with berries and chantilly cream, is of brutal contrasts that combine to sort of biting loveliness.

Ariana Grande scents are great examples of the big oil houses really flexing their muscles to show they can still deliver brilliant scents in the lower price range. Coffee Break and R.E.M were both created by Firmenich, and one can imagine a senior perfumer giving their higher priced formula to a more junior coworker and setting them the task of replicating it at a lower budget. Our noses and our wallets thank them for their service.

VETIVER ROOT - KORRES

I have a lot of time for Korres. This well priced and good natured Greek brand makes some damn good perfume, and their apothecary-style bottles are gorgeous. If there's one thing the niche boom has gutted it is the quality of affordable perfumes, so I always try to support brands that are filling this corner of the market and doing it well.

In the world of olfaction you are either a vetiver person or you are not. Vetiver is a divisive thing, like licorice or politics, and you can't really sit on the fence about it.

I am squarely team vetiver. This grassy, dirty, chthonic note gives so much character and depth to a formulation. My favourite kind of vetiver is the powdery, smoky sort, but occasionally I make time for the more sporty vetivers that play on similarities between the note's sulphurous top notes and citruses like grapefruit.

Korres' Vetiver Root is one such perfume, a fresh-faced scent in the tradition of masculines greats of yore like Vetiver (Guerlain) and the more pedestrian Terre d'Hermes (Hermes).

On first spray, Vetiver Root has more in common with a traditional cologne that a linear vetiver. This is thanks to a one-two punch of lavender and cardamom, two aromatic notes that skew quite bitter, even medicinal, on the skin. They work well in a summer-tinged scent like this one because they give the illusion of a cooling effect.

The aromatics are trebled by a green tea note that does make the entire scent reminiscent of one of the thousand Elizabeth Arden Green Tea flankers for a moment. It's a sophisticated green tea note though, not scratchy or scant, and it is heightened by the perfumer's trick of using bergamot to make a tea accord feel more realistic.

All of this is sounding very light hearted and sporty indeed. This is by design, as all of these light and quick-fading notes are grounded and tempered by the vetiver. This is vetiver's great power, to give other notes longevity and projection. Like rose and jasmine, vetiver it is load bearing wall in perfumery and should only be overlooked if you wish for the entire foundation to crumble.

The original ads for Guerlain's Vetiver, back when perfume ads in magazines hadn't stumbled into the bizarro world they currently occupy, features a shirtless man on a yacht sailing across an ocean of green forest. Ever since I have always considered the sporty vetivers in this genre as yacht scents, designed to be oversprayed by men wearing striped white shirts and zinc across their nose.

It's this feeling that Vetiver Root gives you, complete with the opening melody of Summer Breeze playing and someone's dad firing up the barbecue.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that this perfume is so comfortingly suburban. That feels jarring to say in the aspirational world of perfume that is always trying to sell you on the feeling of grand balls and great luxury. But sometimes I don't want that.

Sometimes it's nice to spray a perfume and be the person who submits tax returns and still gets a childlike thrill when I walk into the cinema and get that first hit of buttery popcorn. It’s nice to have a perfume that I can reach for when the only thing I’m doing all day is getting an iced latte and going on a trip to Costco.

There will always be an escapist element to perfume because scent is so evocative, and perfume houses are eager to capitalise on this. It’s easy to sell a dream. But most of the time I want to appreciate my life, not escape it, and that’s what Vetiver Root gives me. Blast the dad rock, if you please.

GODDESS - LUSH

Where to even begin talking about perfume at Lush?

In recent years the brand has gotten a TikTok-fuelled reputation for its gourmand and vanilla body products, including body sprays that are packaged in huge black nozzle bottles that look like they should hold disinfectant. But to discover the true genius of the brand, swerve past the bath bomb and the dubious looking face masks on ice and head straight to the perfume display.

Lush perfumes are about as weird as you’re ever going to find in a mainstream store. This is a brilliant thing. They’re also sold in accessible 30ml bottles and even cheaper solid perfume tins, making them cost effective too. The labels are minimalist and boring, the bottles are cheap manufacturing stock and the lids are of an even more dubious quality, but none of that matters when the scents are so genuinely interesting.

Of all the designer brands in the world it’s hilarious to me that Lush is the one most famous for its tame gourmand scents like Vanillary or American Cream. In reality the perfumes created by former in house father-son duo Mark and Simon Constantine are so edgy that they have singlehandedly pushed forward the vanguard of what a high street fragrance can be.

I own a few Lush perfumes and I wouldn’t call any of them undemanding. Indeed the thesis of the brand seems to be confrontation: the house is fond of huge overdoses (the near-feral jasmine of Lust), showcasing the rougher edges of raw materials (the bruised-petal powder of Kurbside Violet), and genre-defying accords and structures (the horrific seaweed-tarragon Lord of Goathorn).

Goddess showcases all of these characteristics. It is, on the surface, a rose-oud. This combination is to the perfume world what tomato and basil is to the culinary world: so ubiquitous it would be boring but instead is so brilliant it is timeless. It’s hard to make a bad rose-oud. But it’s also difficult to make a remarkable one.

The other big hitter in the scent is osmanthus, one of the notes I love best in all of perfumery. This floral note is a touch medicinal, a little leathery, a little bit apricot, and a lot of rich floral. Osmanthus is like catnip to me. Though it’s not a traditional fixative in perfumery, to me it always seems to have a magical way of making all of the other notes in a perfume smell deeper, richer, more sophisticated.

Goddess claims to contain real, Laotian oud. I believe this both because Lush are one of those preachy brands that treat their ethics like a commodity, and because the oud in this perfume is so water-thin that they probably only need to use a drop to make the formulation work. The rose and osmanthus are also given a water-light treatment, resulting in a perfume that uses a lot of heavy notes but still feels bright and citrussy.

Oud heads almost universally hate this perfume because the oud is so watercolour thin. The translucency of this traditionally dense note does odd things to the balance of the scent. The result is a perfume that is more aromatic than amber, a rose-oud-osmanthus that is so watered down it’s almost tea-like.

Goddess scent reminds me of an article in the NYT Style Magazine in which the author recalls the moment when he drank a cup of tea that contained a single drop of oud. There’s an unexpected sensuality to the scent at such a high dilution. You don’t lose any of the complexity, but rather discover the unknown country of this incredible note when your attention isn’t laser focused on its more animalic facets.

Goddess packs the punch you would expect from a Lush perfume - I only spray it once or twice - but it’s my version of a kind of light, summer scent. It’s the smell of summer spent on the farm with animals in the pasture and cup of rose and osmanthus iced tea waiting for you back on the porch.

ALMOND - MONOTHEME

Like the thrill of a good thrift, sometimes there is more joy to be found in discovering a brilliant cheap perfume than in buying an expensive one.

That was how I felt when I first stumbled on the brand Monotheme in a local chemist. Like it says on the tin this Italian brand does a wide range of soliflores, single-note perfumes in huge 100ml bottles that sell for about $25AUD a pop. Some of the greatest soliflores on earth sell at about this price range (see Perfumer's Workshop Tea Rose), which leads me to think that formula price restriction must breed ingenuity.

For this price point you can't expect a delicately constructed, nuanced perfume. But if there's an accord or a note you like for its roughest features, you will probably love the version Monotheme rolls out. That's me and Almond, a perfume that is like a pure shot of cheap amaretto.

Since I was a child and was given a dose of cherry flavoured medication of tonsillitis I have loved the bitter, medicinal tang of benzylaldehydes. I can't get enough of the stuff: my hand sanitizer is cherry scented; my lip balm is cherry flavoured; my idea of heaven is the glossy cherry-stem that used to sit on top of mudcakes we would get for our birthdays as children.

Liking a smell even in its most basic form is like enjoying the cheap wine: your wallet is happy and you still get drunk regardless.

All of this is to say that I am biologically predisposed to enjoy Almond. But even given this, it's still a pretty great perfume. This is because it very clearly and legibly plagiarises the almond accord in Hypnotic Poison (Dior), a perfume I love dearly.

Monotheme takes the heart of Hypnotic Posion and makes it watercolour, lighter and fresher with a touch of floralcy. The lightness of the perfume does not make it seem cheap or wan, but rather gives a traditionally heavy and opulent note a lightness that is rather joyful.

The scent is a rare almond perfume that would work perfectly well in hot weather, if you are the type of wearer constrained by seasonal traditions. The lightness of this perfume also makes it wonderful for layering: I have worn Almond over Hypnotic Poison on the days when I'm really desperate for a cyanide overdose.

Though the heart of any almond scent is always that bitter cyanide, this perfume is clever enough to understand that a truly great soliflore uses every facet of a natural scent to litigate its case. Natural almond is a seed that’s treated like a nut because, like most nuts, it has an incredibly high fat content. Almonds are the seed of fruit that grow on almond trees that also blossom with flowers.

You can smell all of this in Almond - the floral of the almond blossom, the lactonic creaminess of almond butter, the sweet-bitter powder of almond oil. An entire world in miniature: that is what makes a brilliant soliflore. Not too bad for less money than a takeaway dinner.

And I'll have my cherry on top, too. ▣