Nicolaï

Letter from the afición

If you’ve loved a firm from its early days, you feel like you own emotional shares and end up miffed when they make choices that are, of course, literally none of your business. I feel that way about Nicolaï. It so happens that I lived in Paris in 1989 when they opened. I read about them in a magazine, went to the small Nicolaï shop on Avenue Victor Hugo, and bought most of their range.

Avenue Victor Hugo is very Rive Droite posh. You can tell it’s that kind of posh when you get out of the eponymous Metro because there are no food stores. It’s as if the rich get others to do the eating for them, or only eat bouquets from the florist and maybe the odd cashmere sweater on Sundays. But a major difference between French posh and, say, Italian posh is that the French have very little visual taste and make design choices with all the discernment of a provincial property developer. They only ever achieved graphic simplicity and coherence just after WWI, as in Gallimard covers and Chanel bottles, both from 1921. Dowdy is now France’s default visual mode.

The Nicolaï shop and all the others around it were indeed dowdy, but not the fragrances. Nicolaï’s 1989 range was stellar: the original Odalisque, a smooth, liquid, marbled masterpiece somewhere between Molyneux Vivre (1971) and Rochas Byzance (1987); New York, in my books the most perfect masculine of all time; Number One, a dense, muscular, Lauder-like construction I never really liked but which got a very prestigious prize and put them on the map; and Cologne Sologne, a pleasant herbaceous cologne that did what it said on the can. By contrast, the look of the place was a little confusing—half artsy-craftsy l'Occitane and half chintzy Annick Goutal. The perfumes were at Guerlain level. Patricia de Nicolaï herself is related to the Guerlains and had worked as a perfumer at Quest, at that time a powerhouse composition firm that employed all the stars: Olivier Cresp, Françoise Caron, Calice Becker, Chris Sheldrake, and Maurice Roucel.

In the intervening years, Nicolaï went through various phases that made me worry it would not survive. At one low point, they had opened a second store on Rue de Grenelle, which was very posh too, but on the left bank, where the Gauche Caviar does not object to a great cheese store and a few bodegas. The shop was rather bare, Artisan Parfumeur style, and its window was inexplicably defaced by a large decal that said, “Factory store, discounts all year.” This would have been a faux pas anywhere in Paris, but, given the place and content, it was truly suicidal. The packaging on the shelves was crazy; the company could not settle on a single shade of Nicolai blue, so everything looked as if it had faded at different rates.

Mercifully, they lived, and the modern Nicolaï is a very different business: solidly good packaging, handsome bottles, decent graphics. In recent years, Nicolaï perfumes have been half-heartedly flirting with some niche tropes. It is a requirement of modern perfumery to be explainable, and many fragrances are named after raw materials: verbena, iris, musk, leather, wood, yuzu, etc. It is also now a tradition, inaugurated by Le Labo’s maddening condescension, to troll the customer by not putting a perceptible amount of the title material in the composition. Nicolaï does not quite go that far, but some of the names are clearly deceptive.

I pine for the days when perfumes had poetic names. Santal 33 in my books does not have the poetic power of Je Reviens, but of course these are different times. Supermarkets tell you the clementines you’ve just bought are “succulent and tangy.” Waiters in good restaurants put your order on the table, straighten up, and list what’s on your plate. You can do that with Santal 33 and its purported notes. But there’s no unpacking Je Reviens because the content of a poem is not the list of words used to write it. And it wasn’t just the names that were poetic. The slow pace of creation meant that perfumes were considered, edited, refined, polished, more often than not without focus groups, put in an amazing bottle with a drop-dead name (Nuit de Noël, by God), and it all added up to a gesamtkunstwerk. Mark my words, those days will return, and then Nicolaï will be in pole position.

credit: widgie’s attic, eBay

I’ve spoken to Patricia de Nicolaï several times, and she struck me as splendidly immune to the vapid nonsense that pervades the industry. She embodies the great tradition of French perfumery and was for many years the director of the Osmothèque in Versailles. This is the Perfume Museum, which graduated from a refrigerated basement to a luxurious venue in my lifetime. Unlike most perfumers working today, she has smelled, analysed, reconstituted and catalogued most of the great creations of the past. She very kindly sent me bottles of the perfumes I mention below. She is perfectly capable, with her mastery of perfume melody, space, and texture, to produce a solemn masterpiece on the level of her early work. I hope she takes the time to do it or trains someone who will.

For subscribers: reviews of Riviera Verbena, Iris Medicis Intense, Baikal Leather Intense, Eau de Yuzu, Bois Belize, Poudre de Musc Intense and Caravanserail Intense.

Riviera Verbena

I used to love infusions as a child, partly because I took them to be liquid versions of pale second-rank gems like tourmaline and topaz. Verbena, it seemed to me, had been invented to let you know what peridot smells like when it’s not a faceted solid. Also when I was in a bar with my parents I would order a verveine because it came in a stoneware cup labeled “Verveine du Velay," and the name Velay conjured up a magical region inhabited by beautiful princesses in profile, their hands up in prayer, wearing green cloaks edged in white fur.

My first thought when smelling Riviera Verbena was “Eau de Guerlain!” The mild, transparent, melodious citrus-lemon-balm accord cheerfully jumps out at you. Three minutes later, the Guerlain and Nicolaï compositions swerve apart, and erosion —in perfumery the weak hides the strong—reveals a sharp, powdery, Badedas-like camphoraceous note. The junction between natural and synthetic, always tricky, is a little sudden here but still satisfying. RV settles down to a classic Cologne drydown that will earn you plaudits for its affable indoor voice.

Iris Medicis Intense

The word Medicis—French for Medici, the Florentine ruling family—is there to remind us that iris root is traditionally grown, dried and aged in Florence. The whole iris saga of recent years is an example of the Devil granting your wishes. Iris contains irone, related to the ionones of violets by the movement of one carbon atom from its natural place to a synthetically awkward one next door. Iris smell is the melancholy, remote sister of the irresistibly lovely smell of violets.

Everyone fell in love with iris when Lutens launched his funereal Iris Silver Mist in 1994, but nobody dared mess with the idea until Prada’s Infusion d’Iris (2007) put it on the map again. Iris had become cheaper by then, partly because chemical aging methods were introduced to speed up the formation of irone in iris roots. The difficulty is that iris is an iridescent smell, prone to changing shade in different light and context. It can easily become beery or bread-like, both pleasant smells but distinctly less refined. Many, indeed most, iris fragrances fell into that trap.

Nicolaï’s approach to iris is informed, I believe, by her familiarity with Vincent Roubert’s Iris Gris (1946), reconstructed from the formula and stored at the Osmothèque. What was remarkable about Iris Gris was a strange, wistful cheerfulness in the rather funereal iris setting, as if smiling through tears. Nicolaï chooses to take that mood in a more robust direction, navigating between the twin rocks of the ethereal Après l’Ondée and the somber Iris Silver Mist. The brilliant idea in IMI is to connect the pallor of iris to the off-white powderiness of both marzipan and mimosa.

In this company, iris makes new friends and comes across as one powdery note among many, steering the composition away from what would otherwise be a pale gourmand. Very clever compositional work, and a strikingly unusual fragrance with, unlike most irises, excellent staying power.

Baikal Leather Intense

I do not remember a fragrance ever smelling so different every time you restart it by spraying it on a blotter. BLI is akin to a break in snooker: the smallest change in angle sends the balls in completely different directions. What the breaks have in common is a remarkable feeling of space opening up between the components in the first minute or two, a surprise effect that holds your attention. This said, this is not a leather or suede fragrance in the conventional sense. Not much smoke, not much bitterness, no smoothness. The only leather connection I see is with the surprising fruity note of Knize Ten (1925). As soon as the snooker game gets underway and the top notes are potted, the charm fades and the remaining structure seems bare and cheap, a sort of Le Mâle with cherry on top.

Eau de Yuzu

Citrus notes always feel to me like musical accords: the minor third of mandarins, the fourth of lime, the fifth of orange, the octave of lemon, the Italian sixth of bergamot. I was looking forward to some wonderful dissonance, some bitter, jaunty tritone straight out of Prokofiev. Instead, Eau de Yuzu starts with the briefest trumpet blast of regulation herbaceous citrus. Then a well-groomed, studiedly normal guy walks in, wearing an aftershave from the seventies, slightly melancholy and generic, a cheerful version of Rabanne pour Homme (1973). Thereafter, EDY is the sort of thing you smell in his car if he gives you a lift to an off-site meeting early in the morning, and whatever he sprayed on is still a touch loud in that confined space.

Bois Belize

One of Brian Eno’s many great inventions is a type of music of monochrome emotions and predictable dynamics, meant to be listened to at a respectful distance while conversing. It is the musical equivalent of the sushi conveyor belt, from which we pick things we like as they sail repeatedly by. While speaking, the listener taps into the ever-beautiful contrast between emotive voice and indifferent music, and feels the small joy of speaking a brief voice-over in his own life’s soundtrack. Much of niche perfumery ineptly tries to elicit that downtempo mood but cannot muster a decent sound. Woody notes are the strings of perfumery and, when handled by masters, give stoic, reflective masterpieces like Comme des Garçons 2 (1999). Bois Belize is more determinedly faceless, a smooth, variegated sweet-dry inlay of stone grey and dark brown. Nicolaï is schooling the wannabes.

Poudre de Musc Intense

It is always a pleasure to see a perfumer indulge in an exercice de style, a perfume whose purpose is to illustrate a single idea to its fullest extent. Here the idea is “cloud of clean,” the color scheme is “candied almonds,” and the vibe is “Belle Epoque masculine.” I suspect Patricia de Nicolaï also wanted to show that the IFRA restriction on the use of heliotropin is just a small bump in the road for a skilled perfumer. Plan B to saintly heliotropin is its brisk, businesslike sister helional, in which a couple more carbons turn soft innocence into steely resolve. PdMI’s construction amounts to wrapping a lamb’s fur around helional’s wolf voice, and the trick succeeds. In the end the wolf wins, but so gradually that you hardly notice it was after you all along.

Credit: Perfect Tables, Etsy

Caravanserail Intense

CI belongs to a category of fragrances, of which Azemour les Orangers (Parfums d’Empire, 2011) is the most satisfying example. They are built on an intense citrus-spicy accord, and the effect is a cologne-plus-pomander medley, entirely pleasant but to my mind more suggestive of a delicious ambient smell than a perfume. There is a spacious feeling, an opera-makeup vividness to CI which works best from a distance. Up close, CI feels a little harsh to me, but a strip on the dresser smelled wonderful when entering the room.

samples kindly sent by brand