CB Report, Part VI: Smell Without Prejudice

I wore Opium briefly in 9th grade, around the time I stopped wishing I were blond and came to terms with my hairy Middle Eastern darkness. But what a corny way to do it—Opium is the Middle East through a Western lens, an olfactory example of Orientalism in the Edward Said sense. Emphasizing the exotic to the point of cartoonishness drag.

Has anyone smelled it lately? Liz F. has, right? What was it like, before you knew what it was? I wonder what it would smell like if I smelled it today, if the memories of envying my jocky blond schoolmates, failing geometry, hating my headmaster and waiting impatiently to get the hell out of Bloomfield Hills would make in impossible to smell it anew.

Chandler Burr got that chance recently. Here’s what he had to say about Opium:

Françoise Marin, Jean-Louis Sieuzac and Raymond Chaillan created this perfume. I am somewhat loath to say anything about it until you all have it [the volunteers were passing out blotters at this moment], because commercial phenomena tend to accrete prejudices and hardened views that inhibit an objective resmelling of a work of art, and some perfumes in particular are so burdened by marketing and mythologizing that they drown in it. I’d like you to smell this without prejudice.

Probably the first thing to say about it is that what we are doing right now is inevitably inaccurate. This is a perfume that cannot, categorically, be accurately perceived on a blotter. It just can’t. Even on skin it can’t be accurately perceived within the first five minutes. It must be put on skin and must be given time—half an hour is probably about right—for it to level off and stabilize and become what it should: an excellent oriental of vanilla, patchouli and every variety of spice. Opium is to dark scents what opium smoke—white and angelic—is to smoke, a purer, cleaner, more mesmerizing version.

I was at a restaurant with my agent a few months ago, and the woman at the table next to us was wearing the most astonishing perfume (this one, of course), and I finally leaned over and said to her, “What the hell are you wearing? It’s amazing,” and she said, “Opium.”

When a perfume is so tied to a social clique, in this case the jet-set of the late ’70s and ’80s, it’s difficult to smell it. Opium is virtually indistinguishable from its ethos, and the ethos becomes the juice. When Oscar Wilde arrived at Magdalen College, Oxford, the story goes that he brought with him the most extraordinarily beautiful set of porcelain dishes, the discussion of which throughout the university overshadowed their owner. Wilde, asked about them, at one point replied, “Yes, I’m having the most dreadful time living up to my china.” I feel the same way about Opium.

(Image: Oscar Wilde.)