The Search for...

My search for the perfect fragrance was a search for authenticity. Raised in the Eighties and Nineties in an affluent suburb about fifty miles from the city, I had learned about fragrances at an early age on trips with my mother to the local Saks and Bloomingdale’s. I had learned that they were about how you looked, how you made your money and how you attracted the opposite sex. By and large, they seemed to be about fulfilling the expectations created by magazine advertisements. The formula was something like that dress, that car, that house and that man. And the formula was a work of genius. Everybody wanted evidence of it in their daily lives.

It wasn’t until much later, in graduate school, that I began to think about fragrance as something that expressed the individual or that gave its wearer pleasure before anyone else. I had smelled a very fine patchouli fragrance on another guest at an East Village dinner party. Earthy, dark and pungent, it complemented her little black dress, her silver jewelry and her foreign accent. The next weekend I made a point of visiting the women’s fragrance counter at Barneys and asked the salesperson to guide me through the various renditions of patchouli. After about an hour-and-a-half I put my finger on Etro’s Patchouli, a complex patchouli with citrus and floral notes. It became my winter scent. Friends would pull me close for a kiss and then linger over my overcoat collar or cashmere scarf. Some would comment on the strangeness of it, the singularity of it. After all, it was 2001. The era of innocuous aquatic men’s scents was in full swing. If something didn’t reek of Dolce & Gabbana Pour Homme, it was exemplary.

That spring, as the weather changed I realized that the patchouli wasn’t working. This time, instead of going to Barneys I went to the Etro boutique. I tried about five more of their fragrances and this time bought a bottle of Vetiver. Little did I know how important that bottle would prove to be. Vetiver, I learned, was a root much prized in India, Southeast Asia and Indonesia for staving off erosion. In many of those same places, it was used to make floor mats and shades, which incidentally worked well against mosquitoes. On me, it was austere and manly but in an introverted sort of way. I decided it would be my fragrance signature. I still knew relatively little about its importance in perfumery.

As the years went by and I came closer to finishing my doctorate, I acquired a number of different styles and “arrangements” of vetiver. There were the classical ones, like Givenchy and Carven; the wildly popular tobacco-inflected ones, like Guerlain; the dirty, sweaty ones like Maître Parfumeur et Gantier Route du Vétiver; and the seaside ones, briny and brisk, like Annick Goutal Vétiver and The Different Company Sel du Vétiver; and even the seductive Oriental ones, like Montale Vétiver Sables and Serge Lutens Vétiver Oriental. At each step of the way, I yearned for a vetiver to call my very own. Earthiness here appealed more to me than high polish. Somehow a touch of dirt brought nature back into my life in the concrete jungle and didn’t toy with my own body’s scent. But this dirt––this root system, rather, with the dirt still clinging––was maddeningly elusive.

And then, this past summer, I found it. After sniffing hundreds of different vetivers, I came upon a new one right back where I had started ten years before: Nasomatto Absinth. It was an unexpected surprise. Rooty, nutty and mushroomy, it captured my attention immediately. Finally, I thought, here’s what the French call sous-bois (“undergrowth,” “forest floor”). But the real surprise came when I realized that the unadulterated vetiver for which I’d yearned all those years was unattainable without the help of things like patchouli, bergamot and wild fennel. Where Paradise was lost, the art of perfumery had begun.