Amouage Gold Woman

vintage decant raffle # 2

Amouage Gold in its original Omani-designed packaging and surprisingly heavy lead-glass bottle.

Amouage Gold starts with a classic Arab tale. A Genie of the Thousand Bottles (the great perfumer Guy Robert) is asked by the Sultan of Oman to come up with the definitive feminine fragrance to start an Omani perfumery firm called Amouage (amwaj أمواج meaning “waves”). An impertinent listener might immediately object:“Wait, wasn’t Oman already big in the perfume trade back when the French were bathing just once a year? Their Sultan asks a French dude to do their fragrance?” And the answer is yes. Amouage had international ambitions, which in 1983 meant French, as the spelling of its name indicates.

Guy Robert at the time had Calèche, Madame Rochas and Dioressence under his belt. Nobody has that track record unless they have a serious interest in women, and Guy Robert certainly did, in the French mode of Pepe le Pew. When I visited him in his house in Fontvieille while researching my olfaction theory, he was a perfect host, cooked a sensational lunch of Provençal food, amiably answered all my questions, and then lamented the fact that I was not a woman in a short skirt. The last time I saw him, at a memorably luxurious Amouage launch, he was already frail yet in buoyant spirits, under a silk-curtained dais, surrounded by buxom women listening to his every word. He caught my eye, smiled and sent a wordless message that said, I’m all right, stay right where you are.

I remember him telling me that the brief was once-in-a-lifetime simple: do the best you can, cost no object. Oman was famous for its incense and for the ambergris that regularly lands on its beaches. Ambergris (aged fatty whale shit) is not picky about where it floats to, but the Omanis know what it is and collect it, whereas most people around the Indian Ocean kick it along the beach thinking it’s congealed oil tanker residue. Robert famously had his Dioressence epiphany when, after handling a lump of ambergris at a London dealer, he washed his hands with a cheap soap scented with an imitation of Miss Dior and realised that the sum of the two was what he wanted.

Amouage Gold can therefore properly be described as Calèche + ambergris + enough silver Omani incense to keep everyone happy. Incense is not a powerful material and certainly does not jump out at you in Gold. In fact, nothing stands out. Gold is the epitome of the scintillating, soft dustcloud that Chanel No. 5 popularized and everyone imitated thereafter. The idea is to create a volume without asperities, with every material invisibly joined to its neighbors and sanded down until the nose feels no corners. What aldehydes do is add inner light without color; their dazzling whiteness illuminates what is around them. Without aldehydes, the great floral aldehydics would be bottom heavy. With them, the center of gravity moves up to their heart region.

The organ-playing metaphor pulling out all the stops applies perfectly to Amouage Gold. It is a massive, hands-and-feet chord of pedal bourdon, salmagundi strings, clarion and trumpets with tremulant effect fit for the entrance not of an austere Sultan, but of a foppish, beribboned Sun King on high heels, carrying a long tapping staff to call the Court to order. Because of its Omani provenance, Gold has sometimes been described as an Oriental (term now obsolete). If so, the Orient begins at the Breton port of Brest. No fragrance has ever been more solidly French than Gold. Wear it when going through border police at CDG, and the dude will say, “Bienvenue au Pays.”

Unless they specifically request otherwise (there are some weird people out there), all commenters to this post will be entered in a raffle for five decants of the vintage Amouage Gold depicted above.