[posted from San Francisco airport] I’m in California on a science trip, attended the launch of a San Francisco AI Institute called CIMC yesterday, then found myself with time on my hands, which often leads to looking up weird perfumery stores in the neighborhood. While walking to the launch I found a wonderful store selling hats and British clothes for men and bought a bottle of St John’s Bay Rum, which smells great if, like me, you like cloves. Then Google found me a store in Lake Tahoe that sounded great, Fragrance Vault. Tahoe is three hours away from SFO but I like driving because it helps me think1. I contacted owner Jana Menard and she was wonderfully welcoming, so I decided to go up to Tahoe, talk to her, smell some of her treasures and spend the night there.
Fragrance Vault is in a mall next to a Target and is the most jaw-dropping niche and vintage perfume store I have ever seen. Jana patiently explains to customers that this is not a self-serve Sephora, that she will spray fragrances on strips on request.
The two side walls contain thousands of vintage fragrances, masculines on the right and feminines on the left. There are also dozens of factices, and even some bottles big enough to be factices but containing a quart or two of actual fragrance. On a high shelf, four bottles of vintage Dior, the large one still filled with perfume. The strange little flag on the bottle of Miss Dior is the pennant of the Italian Line of ocean liners. The large bottles must contain two litres or so of vintage perfume.
The middle island exhibits contemporary niche, and a small glass cupboard at the back, hidden under a sheet, contains the Crown Jewels, many of which I had only heard spoken of in reverent tones. I asked about vintage Guerlains and she brought out three plastic crates from the back containing boxed and unboxed marvels from what looked to me like 70-80 years ago, something like thirty bottles of Mitsouko and L’Heure Bleue of various sizes, some open, some sealed.
Her supply routes span the world. I asked whether she had any Mitsouko soap and she immediately handed me a box of three, saying she had bought 48 boxes from a Munich pharmacy recently. She was on the phone to a collector who wanted to buy several thousand dollars’ worth of Hervé Léger fragrances. She is, among other things, the only US store carrying Mendittorosa, etc.
By then the store had closed and she brought out stuff from the corner cabinet. The contents were simply jaw-dropping. Vera Violetta by Roger & Gallet, the first fragrance to use synthetic alpha-ionone (so Falsa Violetta).
Pastoral Poême by Rallet (Moscow) whose in-house perfumer was Ernest Beaux. Rallet is best known for No.1, the precursor to Chanel’s No.5. Jana is the only person I’ve ever hear pronounce Rallet in Russian, Ra-’lyet. She is fluent in Russian. We reminisced about Moscow in the early ‘nineties when it turned out we both worked there at the time.
Well, you may ask, how did it all smell? The bottles of Vera Violetta and Rallet were still sealed, and terrible things happen to those who dare open them. We did sample some Mitsouko and L’Heure Bleue from outsize Baccarat bottles.
This is where things got strange. The fragrances smelled strangely light and airy. At first I attributed it to the fact that Jacques Guerlain’s creations, in early years, were much more citrusy and airy than the current ones. But then I understood what was going on: the air was too dry for my sense of smell to work properly. The last time I experienced that was in Santa Fe, NM where humidity is zero and Tania and I had to stand next to a boiling kettle to smell anything at all. Jana is clearly adapted to the dry, thin air of Tahoe but I was not. Imagine being in perfume heaven and finding out that a curse has made you hyposmic!
On the road I listened to three hours of Scriabin played by the great Maria Lettberg, which turn out to be great road music.
Thank you so much for sharing this story.
I had exaclty the ame experience of "hyposmia" in Death Valley, where hygrometry is probably even below 0% !
Not only the intensity of the fragrance I had taken there was much lower, but the perception of fragrance itself was modified. Only the louder base notes were able to fly away, along with some salicylates. I could hardly recognize it.
Back to Mitsouko, your story made me realize that perfumes are not only the image of an era, but are also space dependant.
Would He have created Mitsouko anywhere else than in Paris and its damp atmosphere, the balance of the accords would have been entirely different, and the result as we know it, non-existant... Freaky !
Thank you again.
How is it that Lake Tahoe can support a fabulous vintage fragrance store but New York City can't? I mean, yeah, I know why: rents and the slow disappearance of all kinds of retail, specialty and otherwise. Just because I know why doesn't make it any less sad.