Compound Brut™ (FraterWorks)
Time Travel
I do not recall using a fragrance before Brut (Fabergé, 1964) but most definitely owned a small bottle of it by 1967. In those days I knew exactly nothing about perfumery, and I cannot even remember whether I wore it. I remember for sure that I loved the smell, and just as well, because a bottle opened in my suitcase and soaked what was then my only sweater, an Aran. Despite repeated washes, the smell lingered for a decade even after the yellow stain was gone. I did not mind. Brut was the Corvette of fragrance. Yes, it had all manner of associations that one may in retrospect either love or deplore, but by God, it smelled good and just went, so to speak, like stink.
The greatness of the fougère genre is its ambivalence between edible and poisonous, between come-hither and stand-back. Coumarin supplies the crystal seed from which all fougères are grown. It inexplicably smells both sweet-almondy and bitter as hell. Fougère compositions are meant to scale up coumarin’s contradiction in different ways. Brut did it by building an anisic-musky accord using sweet, powdery nitro musks. Nitro musks were famously discovered in the 1880s by a chemist called Baur who was looking for explosives chemically adjacent to TNT. The N in TNT stands for nitro, an NO2 group achieved by adding nitric acid to whatever you want nitrated. Baur found a derivative that was a lousy explosive but smelled great, the first synthetic musk.
Nitro musks have been severely restricted in fine fragrance in many countries, including the US and EU, but are still common in India and China. They work a treat and are dirt cheap. I remember an Indian company sending me 5 kg of musk ambrette as a sample. A perfumer friend returning from a trip to India some years ago had a hard time at airport security because he had handled nitro musks, and the machine thought he was lightly dusted with high explosives. I am not enough of a perfumer to judge this, but apparently the sweet, pillowy side of Brut cannot be achieved without nitro musks, which explains why the current version does not hit the spot. When I found out that FraterWorks offered a close approximation of the original, I jumped at the chance and ordered a half-ounce.
I reviewed some Frater fragrances recently. Aside from their own compositions, FraterWorks also sells raw materials in small, independent-perfumer quantities and, most importantly, bases, those prefab fragrance building blocks that originally served as a transition between natural materials and fully chemical perfumery. Their catalog is amazing, and if I had money, I would likely order all of it. They also offer reconstructions of fragrances, e.g., “Celsius” (Fahrenheit1) and others. When the reconstructions contain non-compliant materials, the samples come with instructions not to put the composition on skin. Compound Brut™ contains nitro musks, and having read the warnings, I could not wait to spread a couple of drops on the back of my hand, just like in the good old days.
What is it like? Delightful and frustrating at the same time. It definitely is Brut, but a bit like a flickering hologram in a sci-fi movie. Put it on skin or a strip, and 60% of the time the emotion of the old Brut is there to squeeze your heart. The rest of the time, especially up top, the hologram splinters and stutters, forcing you to make a mental effort to hold it together, which is a kind of fun in itself. I felt like the dude on the Solaris space station who prefers a hallucination of his former life to nothing at all. Overall I find the Frater reconstruction mysteriously less sweet than the original and arguably a touch too classy. I’ve had this experience before, when well-intended substitution with a “better” grade of material slightly spoils the effect. Some things are supposed to give cheap thrills. But I am nitpicking here: Compound Brut™ made a happy man feel very old.
Update: the far drydown on the aluminum bottle is exactly right.
A perfumery line named after historic temperature scales might work: Rankine, Rømer, Newton, Delisle, Réaumur, Gas Mark, Leiden and Wedgwood.
Re photography, I was thinking first of metol (1891) which (apart from its early confused history) up until about the 1960s was thought to contain paraphenylenediamene impurities sufficient to the be the cause of 'metol poisoning', the contact allergy that was noted in many users. It was thought by Grant Haist that modern metol does not contain this impurity and is not particularly allergenic. But that could mean that for the first 70 years of its use, there would be a solvent or fine grain effect from the ppd which would not exist in metol made later. As with so much in photographic engineering, there is no published proof. Re audio compression, I have often wondered about that. I would say it is only now that I am finally learning to use dynamics effectively in my own playing (classical piano). But I've always tended to work with German pianos made from 1890 to 1920, which tend to have the largest dynamic range. Also there is the fact that truly soft playing is hard to record, and often comes out louder than you are hearing live. But take everything together, and I believe you are right. One thing that makes it hard to discuss is the stark difference between analogue headroom (gentle and long) and digital headroom (sharp and short). My eyes were opened by a Horszowski recording where the phrases mostly follow a suggestion I heard Casals make, that, in most cases, when the phrase goes up, there should be a crescendo and when it goes down there should be a diminuendo.
Fascinated by this post. I have used some of Fraterworks' raw materials and love them. And would gladly spend all I had on ordering more. It seems that there is the same issue in perfumery that there is to some extent in photographic chemistry, that improved methods of synthesis can sometimes lead to unwelcome results. And with restored audio and films, they are often so clean that the magic is simply not there. The modern version of 'Bird of Paradise' loses the poetic luminosity of the original film. The reconstructed soundtrack for 'City Lights' is missing some essential something, even if that something is just noise that, paradoxically, may help us reach towards the essence? Would love to hear your opinions of their raw materials and their bases. Some of the bases can be hard to find on their site.