Mementos of Youth: How Cacharel Shaped an Entire Era

 

For many middle-aged women, Cacharel was a cultural phenomenon; their fragrances were offered as assuredly successful gifts to young women en masse. And they used to be really good too! 

photo borrowed via Fetherstone Vintage blog

 

Cacharel's Eden from 1994 is the precursor to neon-green compositions like Mark Jacobs Decadence and Thierry Mugler's Aura, which were introduced as trailblazing in recent years, but they were not. Considering that the latter, with its green rhubarb-gardenia accord in the eau de parfum, has sparked comments like "very herbal mouthwash," "grassy soil," "muddy swamps," "musty cellars," "bugs and bug poison," etc., it's not unfathomable that Eden has also been rather challenging for modern audiences. Back then, nevertheless, it was "the newest Cacharel" and its youth appeal was palpable. Every teenage girl and budding woman has fond memories of everything Cacharel made. There was no frog in sight, only princes. 

 Some perfumes were shaped to be gifted as an entry into womanhood, on the other hand. Who could imagine a blockbuster perfume being promoted through porcelain-skinned beauties in soft focus, showing no inch of skin, beyond their necks, set to a baroque soundtrack, in this day and age? And yet Anaïs Anaïs, 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 reminisce fondly of it 40 years later. I can tell you right off the bat that it was my first proper, owned bottle of perfume, bought as a gift and offered with the requisite ceremony. The actual scent of Anaïs Anaïs defies the notion of erotic elixirs as something that is warm and sensuous, relying on a rare for today's standards combination of prim lily of the valley (and a few other lilies) with the dusting of whisper-soft leather in the drydown.

After the Victorian oppression, at least as far as the public life of ladies was concerned, women now claimed their sexuality. They took off their restrictive corsets, which were a means of sexual "control" by their spouses. And they cut their hair short, in a bob, as a sign of their unconformity and modernity. Let us recall Fitzgerald's 1919 short story, Berenice Bobs Her Hair. They wore Charleston dresses ending at the knee, often with a deep neckline and a low plunge at the back. They made themselves up with dark, thin lips and dark eyes on a pale face, with thin eyebrows like a stroke of calligraphy. In short, they looked like a vampire, a harbinger of the goth trend. Cacharel used this to great aplomb with their Loulou fragrance, following closely the script which Louise Brooks immortalised as Loulou in the Pabst classic film Pandora's Box. It was an oriental scent, but for young women. Heliotrope, musk, and an abstract heart of flowers touched by a whisper of aniseed from another planet, heaved and sighed in it. As the gloriously musical score of the campaign commercial implied, it was a poignant love story, possibly tragic. Gabriel Fauré's Pavane is immortal. And oui, c'est moi (i.e. "yes, that's me") answering a young man questioning after Loulou, became an indelible memory in our collective memories.