Damage Control by Denise Hamilton: Novel with Perfume Interest (book review)

To come across a book referencing scents, and specific perfumes on top of that, is one of the rare and largely misunderstood pleasures of a distinct nerdo-subgroup called "fumeheads", who, like illicit drug addicts, turn to whatever can give them their daily fix of olfactory stimulation. Usually it's liquids in beautiful bottles that do it, but the more cerebral of the lot turn to written material as well. Beyond specialised perfume books, novels in which perfume stands as both a symbol and a clue can provide infinite hedone. The latest of those is Damage Control, a noir thriller by Denise Hamilton.

Actually, set in Los Angeles and the latest of a long tradition that dates back to James Ellroy, Hamilton's novel reads as a neon noir film would, were it originally written for the page rather than the screen. The bright light that sheds everything in the end, the ocean lapping on the desires and memories of the people who work in this city of glam & slum recall the best elements of the genre in an intoxicating and punitive cocktail of celebrity and sex.

Crime novelist and journalist Denise Hamilton is known for her crime novels and the Edgar Award winning anthologies Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics.
In Damage Control everything is recounted through the first-person narrative of PR executive Maggie Silver, a middle-class woman grown up in Los Angeles with a problematic chidlhood, a cancer-striken mother to support and a mortgage to pay off, engaged in a top damage control Los Angeles firm dealing with the elite. She's also a budding "perfumista", a hobby that will come in handy by the end of the book when fragrance provides a clue. Maggie's toughtest case to date involves senator Henry Paxton, a revered statesman suspected of being involved with his young assistant, when the latter is found dead in her flat. Paxton also happens to be he father of Anabelle, Maggie's estranged best friend from high school. Immersing herself into the case, Maggie gets flooded with memories of her friendship with Anabelle, severed via an unexpected tragedy which marked both. Now that she's back on track with the Paxtons, Maggie must contain the scandal before it explodes beyond control and test the boundaries of friendship once again.

Erotic nuances and flirting with potential killers, psychological insights, ambitions that boil underneath, power struggles and the dirt of top management PR companies are woven expertly into the plot. The time shifting serves as a cubbist's vision into how things got the way they did for Maggie and Anabelle and allows for some twists that have us guessing till the end on who's been nice and who's been seriously naughty.
The writing flows breezinly, shaded with the necessary darkness of the subject, but at the same time illuminated by the courageous, everyday heroism of Maggie who puts herself in harm's way more than she might be expected to given her smarts. Maybe it's the make believe which helps her come through. How else can you explain her poignant impromptu reinvention of her childhood, right at the Paxton's table, giving her alcoholic father the protective mantle of a Hollywood ghost writer?
In some regards we're supposed to identify to some degree with Maggie, who often asks the questions we are asking ourselves pacing through the pages. The language is even poetic in parts, evocative of her feelings and images that take shape and form before our very eyes, without veering into purple.

"Anabelle?

What if she’d crossed the highway to the ocean, swimming out until she drowned? I pictured her body carried on the swell of the waves, arms spread like wings, orange crabs crawling in and out of empty eye sockets, long blond ropes of hair floating like seaweed, a million microscopic sea animals clinging to her curves, illuminating her in a phosphorescent shroud."

Hamilton isn't reinventing the wheel by spluttering the book plot with several scent mentions. Fictional sleuths especially, from Sherlock Holmes and the heroes of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories to modern examples (such as Ruth Rendel's The Rottweiler, where characters wear Jo Malone Tuberose, Charriol’s Tourmaline and Bobbi Brown), have been known to use all five senses to solve a crime. In Agatha Christie’s novel Mrs. McGinty’s Dead,  the murderer sprays someone else’s signature perfume in the room to make the police incriminate someone else instead. But the references by Hamilton aren't just passing snippets; they reappear throughout the plot and resonate with the perfume collector reader. Probably because Denise is actually one of us, her perfume collection accordingly taking a decent portion of her residence. That's why recherché mentions sprinkle the pages, from Serge Lutens Chergui (offered for sniffage to Anabelle by Maggie), or Dior Dune, its trail picked up by Maggie's mother, right through to the heroine's office scent Eau de Guerlain ("just a subtle scent amulet to infuse me with secret grace and power").
Witness the following telling snippet:

Le Boutique was a thrift store. Like many women I knew, I struggled to make ends meet. [...] So, frugalista that I am, I waited for sales and then splurged on basic black and good bras. [...]
At the counter , I browsed the jumble of cheap jewelry and asked to see a box of perfume. It was Chaos by Donna Karan. and smelled smoky, sweet, and spicy. I said I'd think about the 29.95$ price tag (pretty steep for the thrift store).
"Too exotic" I told the clerk as I left ten minutes later, the clothes racks having proved a disappointment.

Back at the office, I found the fragrance had dried down subtle and intriguing -a warm essence of cinnamon and cardamom, musk and lavender. It conjured Southeast Asian bazaars, aromatic oils, harems, Arabian genes emerging from lamps to grant wishes.
 On impulse, I Googled it.
Chaos was discontinued and highly sought after, selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Sniffing my wrist again, I revised my initial opinion.  Now I could appreciate its complexity. Shallow and easily swayed, that's me. [from chapter 14]

Hamilton is forthcoming with the challenging characterisations as well, agree or disagree. PR man Bernie Saunders, drawn in darker colours, is wearing Kouros by YSL. "If Satan wore cologne in hell, it would be Kouros". Touché!

The greatest triumph of Denise Hamilton is her Damage Control simultaneously makes you want to slow down and savour it, while at the same time it keeps you on your toes into making it to the end to see what actually happened.
Damage Control [Scribner,  ISBN-10: 0743296745] is available on Amazon and in Amazon Kindle version.

In the interests of disclosure I was sent a copy by the publisher. Author's photo via Bluebird blog

Panettone: Classic Italian Flavour for Christmas

Michele Franzan, writer for Gola Gioconda, a Florentine food magazine, advises buying panettone from a first-rate baker. I am reminded of this wise advice preparing for wintertime Venice, where the scent of bakeries is filling the air with trails of scent which you have to follow through the small cobblestone alleys and the bridges over the canals. I will miss making it from scratch myself this year.

This succulent, but tricky to make, bread-pudding from Lombardy in Northern Italy is forever associated with Christmas preparations, ever since its humble origins at the Sforza times (Milanese rulers in the late 15th and early 16th century). An absentminded cook burnt the dessert for Christmas' Eve and in his mortification his assistant Toni suggested using the leftover dough with what was on hand at the moment: eggs, raisins, candied fruits, butter and sugar. The end result was lavishly compliment, but the cook recounted with humility that “L’è ’l pan del Toni” (It is Toni’s bread). This is most probably fiction, no less because Toni is such an Italian-American nickname, and theories abound on the origins of the word and the recipe (Among them “Pane di tono” from French the “pain de ton”, aka “rich people’s bread”, and the Milanese “panett”, from the “panett de butter” i.e. small pack of butter).

Whatever the reality is, there is no doubt that panettone is delicious in its pliable sponginess, its fresh flesh yielding under the teeth and its candied fruits and raisins tickling the palate into a panorama of flavour. It's a hard to resist delicacy, reminiscent of fragrance and in fact often standing in for one on the day one prepares it.The whole house fills then with the creamy scent of melted butter and the baking aroma of sugared fruits and eggs, the whole emitting its rich, inviting, comforting scent all around. This is one of the main reasons to bake your own, besides the industrial ready-made variety being not as fresh and possessing a slightly plasticky texture. In reality it's no harder than kneading and baking your own bread.

Panettone Recipe:

For the first rising:
5 ounces (140 g) fresh yeast cake(at the refrigerator section of good supermarkets and at the baker's)
3 1/3 cups (400 g) flour
3/8 cup (90 g) unsalted butter
5/8 cup (110 g) sugar
6 yolks
1/2 teaspoon salt
4/5 cup (200 ml) tepid water

For the second rising:
2 1/3 cups (280 g) flour
5/8 cup (110 g) unsalted butter
7/8 pound (400 g) sultana raisins
1/2 cup (100 g) sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon honey
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 yolks
A little flour for dusting the work surface and mold

The how to:
The evening before, melt the butter over a very low flame or a double boiler. Dissolve the sugar in about 2/5 cup (100 ml) of warm water (not too hot or it will kill the yeast, test with your hand). Put the melted butter, salt, and yeast cake in a mixing bowl. Next add the yolks and sugar, and sift in the flour without stopping whisking (It might take a tad more water at this stage). You want a smooth dough with plenty of air bubbles (too much whisking will burst them and it won't rise properly). Put it in a lightly floured bowl, cover it with a kitchen towel, and keep it warm (85 F, 30 C) for the night.

The next morning wash the raisins, drain them well, and set them on a cloth to dry.
The dough should have trippled in volume by now. Put on a working surface and add the flour, vanilla, yolks and honey. Knead with youy hands for about 20 minutes in all directions, then work in all but 2 tablespoons of the butter, which you will have melted as before, and a little water with a pinch of salt.
The dough will become shiny and will unstick: it's time to add the fruit. Divide into little balls that will later go into a baking tray (A pannetoni baking tray is best, but one for cake or for cupcakes will do in a pinch).

Take the balls of dough and put them in a warm corner, letting them rise again for 30 minutes. Grease your hands after they rise and gently put them into a baking tray (A panettoni baking tray is best, but one for cake or for cupcakes will do in a pinch). Leave them like that in a warm, humid corner for another 6 hours.

Heat the oven to 380 F (190 C). Cut an x into the top of each panettone and put 2 tablespoons (30 g) unsalted butter over the cuts. Put them in the oven, and after 4 minutes, remove them and quickly push down on the corners produced by the cuts. Return them to the oven and bake them until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out dry.
When ready, cool the panettoni on a rack; they're ready to serve.You can decorate with sliced blanched almonds if you like, sticking them with a tiny bit of cake frosting, though I personally prefer not to.
Panettoni keep for a good two weeks in a large air-tight biscuit tin, though it's ever so better when fresh.

Bon appetit and Merry Christmas to you!

pic koritsiagiaspiti.blogspot.com

Caron Nuit de Noel: fragrance review

To associate the creamy, reflective and rather introspective quality of Caron's Nuit de Noël (Christmas' Eve) with the naiveté and relative innocence of a Parisian Christmas' Eve Mass is to misunderstand it. If anything, it's a scent of late November, when huge plates of seductive marrons glacés start being displayed at the Viennese Café Bräunerhof, all starchy comfort and glazed vanillic sweetness, chased away by a shot of bitter Fernet Branca after a hearty meal. I'm instantly reminded of La dame aux Camélias (1848) by Alexandre Dumas fils, where marrons glacés were the only type of confection that the courtesan Marguerite Gautier would eat. Her clients were expected to buy bags of them for her to enjoy. Personally I expect my own admirers to gift me with Caron's Nuit de Noël instead; the two are closely linked in the amount of pleasure and allure they exude.

Nuit de Noël, composed by the founder of Caron, self-taught perfumer Ernest Daltroff, in 1922, is rumored to have been suggested by his longtime partner, Félicie Wanpouille, who adored Christmas Eve and the scent of warm furs and incense.
The black Baccarat botte with the golden frieze (like a flapper's headband) is forever associated with the Roaring Twenties, but the scent itself seems at odds with its times and partly its name; even though the intensely warm scent is as pliable and soft to the touch as the softest sable, a parfum fourrure indeed (with the more innocent meaning of the two), its mood is neither one of uproar nor of traditional Christmas smells (cinnamon, spices, pine, gingerbread, incense).Many insist on wearing it at Christmas' time, none the least of which is perfume collector and connoisseur Roja Dove and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.

Formula and Intricasies
Caron's Nuit de Noël (1922) is a soft oriental built on an accord of rose absolu and Mousse de Saxe perfumer's base (i.e. a ready-made accord of ingredients producing a specific effect), with the addition of 25% sandalwood, jasmine, ylang ylang, lily of the valley, vetiver, amber and iris. It's prismatically constructed around 6-isobutylquinoline, a leathery molecule.
The fragrance emits a cozy, inviting scent poised between the starch of marrons and the bitterness of the iodine/leathery note (hence my Fernet Branca evocation) fading into musky woods. Indeed the famous "Mousse de Saxe accord" is comprised of geranium, licorice (created with anise), isobutyl quinoline (leather notes), iodine and vanillin (synthesized vanilla). If older Carons, especially in their superior vintage form, are characterised by a signature "Caronade", a common thread that runs through them, Nuit de Noël is a good place to start this escapade into one of the most chic and historical French perfume houses.

Less incensey than similarly oriental Parfum Sacré, less abrasive or bold than straightforward leathery En Avion or Tabac Blond, Nuit de Noël has a sheen that starts and ends on an unwavering tawny pitch. The spiced rum-licorice notes aplified by musk (a musk comparable to that in Chanel's No.5 and Bois des Iles) take on a rich saturation; the fragrance dries down to a powdery warmth redolent of the bourgeois scents of a festive evening spent outdoors.

Comparing Concentrations & Vintage vs.Modern Nuit de Noel
The modern Eau de Toilette has taken a rosier take than the one in my vintage bottle from 1970 which seems oilier and darker in mood, with a heavier dose of ylang ylang. The Nuit de Noël extrait de parfum plays more on the leathery, woody notes of the Mousse de Saxe base, lasting for a whole night till the next morning; when you wake up and smell your pillow with all the longing of a passionate lover who is already missing what he has just now savoured.

Related reading on Perfume Shrine: How to Date Caron's Nuit de Noel bottles, Caron news & reviews.

Photo from Jean Renoir's film La bête humaine based on the Emile Zola novel. Photo of marrons via 365thingsthatiloveaboutfrance.blogspot.com

Do Genes Determine our Perfume Preferences?

New studies seem to imply that not only our sexual attraction to different mates with different body scents is related to biological reasons hidden in our genes, but that our general fragrance preferences and likes are also embedded in our hardwired immune system.

"Previous research has found that a set of genes called MHC genes (short for major histocompatibility complex) is related to whether someone is sexually attracted to someone else's scent. People are most likely to be attracted to the scent of someone who has different MHC genes than they do. [...] Hämmerli and his colleagues hypothesized that our MHC genes may also dictate our preferences for other smells. [...] Hämmerli's team recruited 116 study participants — both male and female — and asked them to smell 10 different scents, including cedar, rose, cinnamon and moss.
Some smells were clear winners and losers — the highest rated was tolu, a scent that comes from a South American balsam tree and resembles vanilla. The lowest rated was vetiver, which originates from a grass in India and is said to have a "woody" or "earthy" scent. But for each scent, the strength of the participants' preferences varied depending on each person's particular set of MHC genes .[...]Biologist Leslie Knapp at the University of Cambridge said the new study could be expanded to test whether the perfume preferences hold true when the perfumes are worn by others, as opposed to sprayed on one's own body.

Read the whole article here.

Paco Rabanne La Nuit: fragrance review

Smell La Nuit by Spanish-born designer Paco Rabanne and nostalgise about the 1980s with a vengeance. In that carnal decade, La Nuit was aimed at "the sensual, sophisticated and modern woman" "partout où est la nuit" (everywhere where it's night-time) and was quite abruptly discontinued in the following decade. Paco Rabanne fragrances from the 1969 cool Calandre to the 1988 men's aromatic Ténéré and the excellent 1979 Métal suffer from market maladjustment despite their pitch-perfect tune-in with their times; they fly under the radar for no good reason and get discontinued all too unjustly. La Nuit (1985) is a similar case in point.

Poised between a leathery chypre with fruity accents and a deep oriental (with no great sweetness), Paco Rabanne's La Nuit, composed by perfumer Jean Guichard, is vaguely reminiscent of the danger and swagger of vintage Narcisse Noir by Caron: c'est troublant! It also has elements of the sharp scimitar weilded by Cabochard and the urinous honeyed leather of Jules by Dior. 
Once upon a time a certain biophysicist with a keen interest in perfumes had given away the perfume's core character by (positively) claiming that it smells "as if you sprayed Tabu on a horse", thus delineating the two main directions the composition goes for: civet (of which Tabu has oodles) and leather. This of course goes contrary to prior writings in French where he compared the upkeep of interest in smelling the dissonant top notes with musicians tuning up their string instruments before a concert. His apology and excuse?

 "My extenuating circumstance was that at the time (1985) I lived in Nice, where women can be toe-curlingly vulgar, and it was a big hit. [...] Now that the Niçoises have moved on, I see it for what it was all along: the sexiest fragrance since Cabochard”.

The construction of Paco Rabanne's La Nuit lies in the precarious juxtaposition of unassuming, fresh ingredients over "animalic" notes (those smells which recall real animals or rather our libidinous animal urges, as delineated by the discourse between Jung and Freud). The top of La Nuit is profuse in linalool, rather aromatic with a hint of spiciness like basil and myrtle, and a "bruised" citrusy note that results from the aging process in the vintage bottle. In the evolving process, golden hued plum and peach skin (the note made famous by undecalactone in Guerlain's Mitsouko) lend an old-school, rich saturation; compared to the graphic shrill effects that many contemporary fragrances go for in their search for "freshness", 1980s fragrance seem akin to canvases painted by the Great Masters. Of course this tells us more about the state of perfumery now than about La Nuit.
What transpires through this deep, pungent fragrance is an animalic, sweaty mantle (made slightly austere by a woody note of cedar) that engulfs a honeyed rose heart, the latter perhaps reminiscent of L'Arte de Gucci; the rose isn't what it's about nevertheless, but serves as a feminine counterpoint to the more unisex animal notes: Not only a huge dose of civet, but also the whole kit-and-caboodle of retro musks, intimate-smelling beeswax and bittersweet leather, almost urinous notes. The effect is a rich, individual leathery fragrance which can be quite alluring on the right type of defiant woman (or a discerning man); personally I can easily imagine it on Violetta Sanchez.

Extremely tenacious for an eau de toilette and even an eau de parfum (the latter slightly better nuanced) and very discernible sillage make this a vintage fragrance to use sparingly, especially if you "don't want to offend". (Then again, what are you doing playing with La Nuit?). The parfum (procured via a valued friend collector) is frankly exquisite.
I don't find it as debauched or decadent a scent as other hunters of the vintage scented gems (the term affectionately used is "skanky"), but rather edgy and quite French in its "je m'en foutisme" that French perfume wearers always had about their personal choice.
No wonder it's discontinued...

Notes for Paco Rabanne La Nuit:
Top Notes: Bergamot, Lemon, Tangerine, Myrtle, Cardamom, Artemesia (Armoise)
Heart Notes: Jasmine, Rose, Pepper, Peach
Base Notes: Cedarwood, Leather, Patchouli, Oakmoss, Animalic note, Civet

Related reading on Perfume Shrine: The Leather Series (leather scents directory with history info &fragrance reviews)

Photo of Arielle, Monte Carlo 1982, by Helmut Newton