Sous le Vent

All this talk of chypres at Perfume Shrine has me positively green. At a time of year, when I'd usually be contemplating a bottle of Tabac Blond and a pot of Lapsang Souchong, I'm isolating my green scents to a corner of (what my boyfriend has dubbed) "the shrine." Standing out from the midst of them is a small flacon of Guerlain Sous le Vent (1933/2006), recently reissued by Guerlain at their Champs-Elysées flagship and their boutique at Bergdorf Goodman. Sous le Vent is one of my ür-comfort-scents, a complex aromatic chypre that does not bury my nose in sap-soaked, mossy earth but, rather, exalts it in a Provençal herb garden suffused by nearly horizontal rays of sun, wet with morning dew, bordered by beds of rose, iris and ylang-ylang. It is one of the few scents that, each time I wear it, sends me into a type of synesthetic trance: fuzzy pastel points of emerald green and salmon pink move in and out of focus, floating on a cloud of milky white; every few seconds, a lightning-flash of Persian blue "cools" it all down. Sous le Vent is a perfume that, owing to its expertly blended ingredients, nearly eludes analysis. Like Lyn Harris's Eau de Vert, it renews me and, at first, makes me feel clean, but it doesn't stray chez Harris into the fennel/anise part of the garden; rather, after the Guerlinade accord calms down, a little cat comes padding down the walk: civet, ma favorite. In the shadow of Uncle Aimé's masterful Jicky, Jacques Guerlain knew that an animalic was needed to counter the freshness, to give it depth. Surprisingly, the civet does not "dirty" the scent. Rather, it challenges the nose to reconnect to those diminished Guerlinade notes and to pick out the very thing that may explain those flashes of Persian blue: tonka-bean-glazed orris. Along with the initial triad of unmistakeable basil-estragon-lavender, Sous le Vent has me wondering whether Jacques Guerlain created the first gourmand fragrance sixty years before its time.

Image credit: Original advertisement, Ebay.