A Certain Slant of Light

For Mark

This past summer I had occasion to write a short description of Dominique Ropion’s Une Fleur de Cassie. It’s short enough to reproduce here:

“Une Fleur de Cassie is as beautiful a perfume as they come. It’s like the feeling that comes when you’ve finished a chapter of Colette; a feeling, that is, wagered on the piling up of pastel adjectives – the prose equivalent of a Renoir oil sketch. Mimosas and almond milk and pearls held up in the light. It’s a floral that doesn’t project the aura of flowers. It’s a meal and a kiss and a brush stroke all in one.”

With the exception of his Amarige, I am an unabashed fan of Ropion. I adore Aimez-Moi on others; I love Vetiver Extraordinaire on myself and pretty much anyone in my immediate vicinity; and Carnal Flower, while not my cuppa tea, is very Something. Ropion is one of a dying - or rather, dead - breed of perfumers: a Classicist who’s initial capital is hard-won. He is one of those perfumers, not unlike Roudnitska père, who build a perfume from the bottom up; who see the idea of a perfume as less its gimmick than its inchoate form.

Une Fleur de Cassie is a trophy fragrance, a perfume that stands out from the rest of the pack like a Vionnet gown stands out in a starlet-of-yore’s closet. It isn’t about glitz or post-Eighties’ sex-appeal. It’s about Eleganz. It’s about a Bugatti Type 41 “Royale” crunching the gravel on its 5mph procession up a long driveway somewhere in Cove Neck. It’s about a cool April night when you’ve left all the windows open in hopes that spring (and love) have come to stay. Your nose is greeted with the most marvelous scents wafting in from the garden, but you must admit, as you reach for the box of tissues, that you’re a tad cold.

Sure, he used some very pricey ingredients - mimosa absolute, jasmine absolute, cassie absolute, rose absolute - but the parts do not justify the whole, which is much more complex than any ingredient list. It’s as if Ropion let a certain slant of light enter in between each layer of the finished product, and what’s more, he used sandalwood and vanillin in his base with such mastery as to create something on par with vintage Guerlain but worlds - galaxies - apart in style.

Just thinking about Une Fleur de Cassie makes me happy, and there are few perfumes that do that these days.

Image credit: Dale Chihuly, “Macchia” blown-glass bowl (1982), courtesy of ArtNet.