My 12-year old daughter likes to shop for baubles at Claire’s with her pocket money and, unknown to me, bought a fragrance there for £12. She sprayed it on before coming down for supper a couple of days ago and made a grand entrance. It is called Cherry Bliss and is the love child of Flower Bomb and Baccarat Rouge 540. It smells great, a sour fluorescent fruit against a dour, matt background. Sometimes, art settles on something that is actually better when kept simple. The composer Constant Lambert once warned against classical music inspired by folk tunes1. It made me think in retrospect that some great fragrance ideas are in essence folk tunes, and that attempts at refined orchestration will make things worse, not better: Habanita, Fougère Royale, Brut, Cool Water, Old Spice, all simple ideas done with modest means. You will smell the tune of Cherry Bliss in many other places, some costing twenty times as much. But Claire’s is the best version, not just the cheapest.
“The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder”.
There’s a reason why I prefer to listen to a Taraf de Haïdouks album than to Liszt’s renditions of Hungarian folk songs. Love the analogy for perfumery! I think that it applies to other areas of culture, too.
Also, this reminds me. In the mid 90s, I had many perfumes. My then boyfriend's favorite? The inexpensive drugstore scent - Coty Wild Musk!