Assessing a fragrance while inside a Lush store is like standing in a steel foundry and trying to hear your Swatch ticking. Every other item in the store is screaming for your attention, and Lush is not known for shy bath bombs. Nevertheless, three bottles I had somehow not seen before caught my eye. They belong to the Black Label collection. Black labels always remind me of those special buys that low-cost supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl (God bless them) put out around Christmastime, always with gold lettering on a black background, which mysteriously disappear in January just when you’ve decided they were great stuff and good value. The one I picked up was Ginger, which in the store struck me as extraordinarily like the old Vent Vert (Balmain), now replaced by a hideous changeling. Ginger has a lovely galbanum blast up top, set against a dignified rose-jasmine accord.
I remember smelling Vent Vert for the first time in the company of my late friend Myriam in a perfumery on the Boulevard Saint-Michel just south of rue Soufflot. We were 15, and then, as now, it took courage to enter a parfumerie in France at any age. The success of Sephora and Marionnaud stores in France is in good part due to the fact that they put testers out and abolished the once necessary boss battle with some hairsprayed termagant with a grievance who guarded the counter. Parisians were not known for their accommodating attitude to customers, but even the most hardened shoppers only entered perfume stores in an emergency. We saw the bottle of Vent Vert in the window, green ribbon on the neck, label wrapped around the corner, and walked in. Myriam had the sort of charm that Saint Blandine had when they tried to feed her to the lions, which made the lions decide to wait for their backstage chow, and we walked out unharmed with a spritz of VV on our wrists.
For reasons I cannot explain, Vent Vert seemed to me to be a large, hollow, golden sphere floating behind us as we walked towards the river in step, feeling very grown up. The golden sphere feeling never came again, but VV remained for me the essence of a particular French kittenish charm, with soft fur, beguiling eyes, and, if necessary, sharp claws. Vent Vert is now gone forever, and I assume eBay prices will soon rise to a level that does not sustain life. Now to Ginger. Ginger is known for its disappearing act inside compositions, so don’t be surprised if ginger is not the first thing you think of. When smelled in the privacy of the home, it is of course less curvaceous than the original VV, but the leanness is not a problem. There is a hint of a functional green note in the background, but all is forgiven.
Confetti and Sappho were the other two. Confetti is an interesting bittersweet composition contrasting violet leaf with an entirely edible caster-sugar Turkish delight background. Lush’s own blurb describes violet leaf absolute as delicate, presumably for the sort of reasons that led the Furies in Greek mythology to be called the Kindly Ones, in case they were listening. Sappho1is a strikingly animalic but beautifully smooth smoky-vanillic affair with a lovely drydown. These three fragrances have that quality that all Lush fragrances have, which eludes most others, of being at once luxurious, unpretentious and cheerful. Add to that that they are priced at roughly half the level of the competition.
Samples kindly sent by Lush.
Let me push my nerd glasses up my nose and note that, contrary to common practice in English, the name of Sappho, the famous Greek poet from Lesvos whose love poetry is the reason for the word lesbian, is pronounced “sap-fo.”
If Balmain had any sense, there would be a faitful version of Vent Vert extrait available, at least as a boutique exclusive, in the original packaging (though glass not crystal to be affordable to mere mortals) to add some substance to the claim that they value their heritage.
"hairsprayed termagant with a grievance who guarded the counter."
Oh, yes: where did French stores obtain such women? Was there some dark Institute conducting aversive therapies perfecting the glare, the smouldering impatience? I remember my wife fumbling for correct change as one of them seethed at the till. When at last my wife presumed to place the monnaie in Medusa's scaly mitt the latter pointed at the counter and spat: mettez la.