Cacharel Anais Anais: fragrance review & history

Who could imagine a block-buster perfume today being promoted through porcelain-skined beauties in soft focus showing no inch of skin beyond their necks set to pre-classical music? And yet Anais Anais, the first perfume by Cacharel (1978), was advertised exactly like that and became THE reference scent for the early 1980s for droves of young women who still reminiscence fondly of it 30 years later. It's also one of the most influential perfumes in history, at least on what concerns marketing success ~a triumph of Annette Louit~ and top-to-bottom design, if not complexity, quality materials or classicism of composition. It didn't possess any of the latter.

Yet it's still featured on the Cacharel website prominently and is up front on perfume counters. For many,
Anais Anais by Cacharel was the first fragrance they got as a gift; or even better the first they cashed out their pocket money for: Its image was youthful from the start. No doubt the deceptively innocent scent, coupled with the dreamy advertisements accounted for that, as did the opaline packaging with the pastel flowers on it and the slightly suggestive name. It was the debate of many, to this day: Was Anais Anais a reference to writer Anais Nin and her ~"forbidden" to the young~ erotic literature, such as Delta of Venus? Or was it a nod to the ancient Persian goddess Anaitis, goddess of fertility? And which was more provocative?

Cacharel was specializing in retro knits at the time and both references for the name were valid enough, although the company always officially went with the latter. The goddess was testament to a peculiar cultural phenomenon on what concerned the position of woman in the zeitgeist: On the one hand Anais Anais with its imagery disrupted the context of feminism in perfume; the complete antithesis of Charlie by Revlon (1973), if you will, where Shelley Hack was dressed in pants skipping off to work or grabbing the bum of a cute guy in the street as an outward manifestation of her desire to be divested of her traditional passive role. These were both youthful fragrances advertised to the young. So what had intervened in those 5 years elapsing to account for such a change? Nothing much. (If you exclude the rush of spicy orientals in the market in the wake of Opium's success). The French aesthetic was always more traditionally feminine than the American one, going for Venus over Diana, and the marketeers soon realized that the beauty industry can't disregard the changes of times, but deep down, it will always depend on the passivity of the consumer into buying "hope in a jar". Perfume is perhaps the most mysterious of all beauty products, ladden with hundreds associations and legion aspirations. It was deemed best to start bouncing the ball back right away... Plus the youth market hadn't been exploited sufficiently (this was back in the 1970s remember) and someone had perceived that the young regarded standard perfume imagery as bourgeois and old-fashioned: they needed their own. Cacharel was extra attentive to grow the market; they put basins in department stores where they encouraged young women to plunge their hands in basins of water, dry them, apply scented cream on them and then finishing off with a spritz of Anais Anais, extoling the virtues of "layering" for a lasting effect. A youth phenomenon was at work.


And Sarah Moon was called for the Anais Anais advertisements: To take shots of women as pale-limped and virginaly innocent as paintings, lily-like, exactly like the opaline bottle and the main core of the fragrance which was built on lilies of the fields. The long limps gained an almost Piero Della Francesca sanctity, the doe-eyed gazes were soft and narcotized, almost. Were they beckoning unto the males watching, inviting by their easy-to -prey-on-passivity and odalisque-style harem numbers? Or were they nuzzling on each other evoking lesbian fantasies? Perhaps the most provocative thing is that the ladies in question all appeared so very.. young; almost under-age! Whatever the intention, the imagery is still memorable: It marks a mental no-mands-land between the advent of feminism in advertising and the regression to conservative values of the 1990s, peppered with some of the issues that still concern those of us who immerse themselves in beauty advertising with a critical eye.

Four perfumers were credited with the creation of Anais Anais jus: Paul Leger, Raymond Chaillan, Roger Pellegrino and Robert Gonnon, working at Firmenich. A surprising fact as the formula isn't complicated or challenging really. The opening is fresh and a little "screechy", a touch
of green galbanum resin felt all the way through the base (galbanum is in fact a base note but it's felt at the top), giving a herbaceous overture that segues into the main attraction: lily of the valley forms the core coupled with another "clean" note, that of orange blossom, sanctified through the wonders of analytical chemistry. White lilies melt as if gaining human form, tender, devoid of their customary spiciness and given a touch of woody dryness. There is a supporting accord of honeysuckle, jasmine and rose, played sourdine; it's not especially felt. The permeating cleanness continues for long before a hint of playful soft leather in the base surfaces alongside indeterminate, powdered woods to give an intriguing twist to the plot: is this an autumnal scent for more mature women, I wonder?
Although I seem to recall the scent of Anais Anais as a little bit more "substantial" in all its softness, there is no major change in its formula last I compared batches, probably because there is not much of allergens-suspect ingredients necessitating restrictions and because hydrocitronellal (lotv note) has been successfuly substituted anyway. It's a pity the parfum concentration has been extinct for some years now, as it played up the autumnal basenotes beautifully.

Notes for Cacharel Anais Anais
Top: Bergamot, galbanum, hyacinth, honeysuckle, orange blossom
Middle: Lily, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, tuberose, carnation
Base: Cedarwood, sandalwood, amber, oakmoss, incense, vetiver




Sarah Moon photography via weheartit.com and thefashionspot.com

When Someone Usurps your Signature Fragrance

When at school my best friend was using Anais Anais, the soft-focus lily scent in the retro opaline bottle that recalled Victoriana and the BBC series Jayne Eyre and The Barrets of Wimpole Street we were watching on television. Something about the aesthetics of its nostalgia coupled with the erroneous hint that it might have something to do with Anais Nin and her Delta of Venus lured me into getting my own bottle. Little did I know that this act would produce the fury of a Maenad! Never mind that Anais Anais was worn by almost anyone below voting age at the time. The cardinal sin had been commited: I had usurped the signature fragrance of someone else and my penance would be exile.

After half a bottle, I somewhat tired of Anais Anais, no matter how pretty and wistfully autumnal it was. The initial coup de foudre was no longer there. Instead, my heart was pounding with fascination for the decadent opulence of Opium which had marked me years before unexpectedly: finally able to procure a bottle of my own with my pocket money, I did just that. The fragrance became so much a part of my psyche, with sporadic flirts with my mother's Mitsouko and Cabochard, that I could never understand how anyone on God's green earth could claim it. Yet, claim it they did and several other people, usually older, used it as well, often in exceedingly large amounts that became noisesome. I remember I was both dismayed and disappointed at that. Since I loved it so much, one would assume that I would enjoy smelling it in the air, catching the wake of it from passing strangers and acquaintances. But it never seemed to smell properly on them. Yet deep down I was a little relieved as well: It was still mine and mine alone, I was hissing through clenched teeth ~my precious!

The final straw was at the university, when a particularly nosey classmate questioned me on what I was wearing and I was very eager to let her share: a small eau de toilette bottle was always in my Longchamp along with my notebook with lecture notes on the Aeniad, the syncretism in late Middle-Ages and the artifact types of Upper Mesolithic. Soon enough, what was that divine cloud I was smelling two pews below, wafting up to engulf me in the smell of betrayal?
It was at that moment that I had the perfumephile's equivalent of St.John's visions at Patmos: I finally realised why it's not good form to wear the same fragrance as your friend...

Copying someone's identity in its external manifestations and even their intellectual interests, emulating their fashion sense, their hairstyle, their makeup and colour choices and suddenly adopting the same music sense and book material can feel annoying and a little alarming for the one who is being copied: is it to be taken as a compliment or as an invasion of private space and the right to mark one's own territoty?
That last part seems to me to be at the bottom of this particular annoyance. Although we have progressed from the jungle, the jungle hasn't left us: we still need to mark our territoty with the invisible olfactory stain of our id. And we do that with our loved ones and the scents we choose for them as well.
The scent we choose ourselves to represent our id can be even more poignant when usurped: the betrayal is not only on the physical, territorial plane but on the cerebral as well. It's as if our decision to adopt a certain signature fragrance has been cheapened through blatant copying which required none of the visceral or alternatively the meticulous care with which we came to it ourselves. And in a world where there are myriads of fragrances around, finding that special one can be both hard and frustrating to go through again.
Additionally, when that signature fragrance is some obscure niche little thing we unearthed in one small boutique in Crete, hiding behind a local deli with dakos and stamnagathia, and only there, then it feels unique and we subliminally graft that aura on ourselves.

So what to do when asked? Faced with a question as to what is your signature fragrance, you're faced with a trilemma: if you reveal it, you are open for the other person to adopt it and leave you feeling somehow less special; if don't reveal, you risk to seem aloof and arrogant and lose a friend and get gossiped behind your back; if you don't reveal and it's a little known or unpopular choice you run the even greater risk of the fragrance never surviving the axe of discontinuation from the accountants in the manufacturing firm. It's a conundrum!

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that it's better to be gracious and sharing when it is someone who either has a genuine interest in perfume (so you get the chance to win a friend for life) or it is not someone you're bound to meet every single day (therefore even if they copy you, it won't be really significant). Seems to work so far...

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Pics from the film Single White Female via movieshcreenshots blog