PERFUME ODDITIES: STARTLING BY EISENBERG AND SONS

Given the amount of information that’s floating around the internet, you would think that every perfume that’s ever existed would be fully documented. However, every so often I encounter one that seems to have been lost without a trace. I recently came across one when the mother of an acquaintance was downsizing and I agreed to sell a few vintage perfumes that belonged to her. In fact, today I opened an Etsy shop for that purpose, rationalizing it as an opportunity to sell off some of my own hoarded stash of perfumes, too.

There were some common perfumes like Joy and Ecusson from the 1970s, but the real head-scratcher was something called “Startling” by Eisenberg. I Googled and Googled it to try to find information and comparables, but nothing turned up. The only lead was an entry on Profumo saying that it was first released in 1949, was made by Eisenberg and Sons, and that “production was apparently discontinued”. Yeah, it must have been given that no one else seems to know anything about it.

Doing research on the company itself, I found that it is completely unrelated to the Paris company Eisenberg Perfumes, which currently has a line of mass-market fragrances and cosmetics. Eisenberg and Sons was an American company, founded in 1914 as a clothing and perfume retailer and wholesaler in Chicago. Legend has it that they started putting sparkly jewelry on the clothing to make it sell better, but the pins kept getting stolen, so they went into rhinestone and crystal jewelry in a big way. Eventually costume jewelry became their main business, and their pieces are now sought-after collector’s items. The perfumes have sunk into total oblivion – except for the bottle that I now have in my hands.

It’s not a very attractive bottle, just plain and cylindrical like the one in the vintage ad, with the name in big gold letters and an enormous gold “E” on the back (or maybe it’s the front?). The perfume itself is not bad, a typical vintage chypre-type floral. Based on the little I have to go on, it probably dates to the 1960s, or possibly 1970s, if they were still making perfume then.

I’m trying to decide whether to try to sell it and, if so, for how much given that there’s nothing like it listed anywhere. The alternative would be to buy it myself and keep it as an oddity.

If anyone reading this knows anything about this perfume, please leave a comment and let me know. 

METAMORPHOSIS

I’ve been away from this blog for far too long. I think it’s just been a little over a week, but it seems like a year. Teaching a class that starts early in the morning takes its toll, as does trying to make all of the changes that are happening with Olympic Orchids, plus the fact that we’ve transitioned from summer into winter while I’ve been silent.

Right now I feel like the caterpillar lying immobile in the pupa stage, everything on hold, waiting for things to happen as its body melts down and re-forms into something completely different. With new branding, new labels, new bottles, new boxes, and a new website coming soon, things are going to look very different, at least on the “retail” side.

There’s some evidence that butterflies can remember things they learned as caterpillars, so there’s carryover from one state to another, one body to another. The intention is that the old Olympic Orchids memory and way of doing things will carry over into the new, prettier Olympic Orchids embodiment. The single, awkward caterpillar body will grow two wings, the upscale retail website on one side and Perfume for the People on the other. With luck it will be able to fly.

The butterfly carries out its transformation in the privacy of its chrysalis, but mine is a little more exposed to public view. If, like the caterpillar, I had nothing else to do and could just lean back and enjoy the ride, it could all happen fairly systematically and efficiently. However, because I do it piecemeal, as I have time, new designs pop up and are mixed with old ones. Pages on the current website change, sometimes introducing mistakes. Some things are added and others are eliminated during the process of metamorphosis.

I’ve been going over sales figures to see if there are any fragrances that have been consistently poor sellers. The only one that obviously falls in that category is Fleurs de Glace, which I’ve decided to discontinue. I’ve put the current stock on sale, and once it’s gone, it will be relegated to the limbo of discontinued perfumes. If you want some, now is the time to get it. At a good price, too.

I also decided to change the name of A Midsummer Day’s Dream to a shorter one that will fit neatly on a bottle. After its makeover, it will be called Elektra. We brainstormed long and hard on names associated with figs, Shakespeare, and the summer solstice, but the best idea we came up with was the association of amber (the fragrance base) with the property of amber (the fossil/gemstone) as a generator of static electricity. Putting that together with the story of Electra, which originated in a Mediterranean country where figs grow, we came up with a short, catchy name that looks nice on a label. The juice will be the same as before, just under a new name. The old Midsummer Day’s Dream stock is also on sale until it’s gone.

[Swallowtail butterfly life cycle photos from Wikimedia.]

MYRRH AND MUSHROOMS

This morning my sample of the day was D. S. & Durga’s Resin from a 2.5 ml decant that I got on sale from TPC. It didn’t leak or evaporate – hallelujah! I was a little surprised to find that it’s pretty much myrrh straight up, with a halo of sweet, violet powder in the sillage, so I did a search for information about this fragrance. I didn’t find much. There is one fairly negative review on Basenotes, a listing on Fragrantica that says it’s “masculine” and that the notes are “copaiba balsam and myrrh”, and that’s it.

The D.S. & Durga website is one of those overly designed exercises in conformity with the latest trend, complete with a gratuitous “welcome screen” that is late to arrive and overstays its welcome, too many moving parts, light gray or pastel font on an off-white background, and no way to go back once you’ve gone forward. I’ll be glad when the fashion for super-low contrast type and cumbersome animations on perfume websites (and my students’ Powerpoint presentations) goes the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird. What I did find out from the website, by deduction, is that Resin has been discontinued.

Back to the perfume itself. Copaiba balsam isn’t much of a fragrance on its own, and is used more as a fixative than for its scent, which is rather flat, woody, and a little peppery. Myrrh, on the other hand, is one of the quirkiest scents in the whole realm of perfumery. There’s quite a bit of variation from one variety to another, but what’s constant is a deeply resinous, bitter, leathery, almost industrial, note that’s absolutely unmistakable.

I have written about myrrh before, but sometimes I can have a perfectly formed image of a scent in my mind but cannot find the right words to describe it to others in terms they'd understand. This can be very frustrating. Smelling Resin this morning I had an epiphany in the realm of semantics. Myrrh has a distinct smell of freshly cut “champignon”-type mushrooms. All mushrooms have this scent, but the white and brown button mushrooms have it in a fairly pure form, unobstructed by other notes. It’s what I smell when I’m out walking in the woods and catch a whiff of mushrooms before I see them. It’s the smell of dead leaves turned to flesh, the smell of wet, decaying forest sprouting exuberant saprophytic life. Often I’ll go looking for the source of the scent, and sure enough, there the mushrooms are, hiding under the dead leaves or behind a fern. It’s a pungent, earthy scent and it’s one of the notes in myrrh, stronger in some varieties than others.

It’s funny that the natural mushroom absolute that I have, made from cepes, doesn’t smell at all like fresh mushrooms. In fact, it smells more like soy sauce than anything else. However, my experience with the mushroom note this morning set the gears of inspiration in motion yet again, making me wonder what it would be like to create a perfume based on myrrh and mushrooms. It might turn out to be “not suitable for human use” as the Basenotes reviewer observed about Durga’s Resin (I happen to disagree with this statement), but it would certainly be an interesting exercise in blending related notes.

[Myrrh and mushroom photos from Wikimedia]

JUDITH MULLER BAT-SHEBA

It was exciting to find two bottles of Judith Muller’s Bat-Sheba on sale for a price that didn’t break the bank, even with international shipping, so I snapped them up. Bat-Sheba perfume was made in Israel starting some time in the 1960s, and discontinued some time in the 1980s, so bottles that still actually contain the perfume are quite a find.

The first bottle was exactly as described, a full 2 ml mini bottle of the parfum concentration in perfect condition. The bottle is hand-painted, bluish colored iridescent glass, made to look like an archaeological artifact. The screw-cap has a cracked gold finish, and around the neck of the bottle is a gold tie with the name tag. The second bottle was not the 7 ml of EdT that I thought I was buying. Instead, it is another completely full 2 ml parfum mini, but in a reddish-orange colored bottle with the same shape, patina, and tag as the first one. Interesting.

On closer inspection, the tag on the blue bottle has a black border, but the border on the orange bottle is red. The bottom of the blue bottle has “JM3” stamped into the glass, but the orange one has “JM4”. The most telling feature, though was what is written on the back of the tags. The tag on the blue bottle says “Exotic Oriental” and the tag on the orange bottle says “Woody Modern”. That explains why the two perfumes smell so different. I feel like Alice in Wonderland holding two bottles, which will make me either grow or shrink depending on which one I choose.

The solution, of course, was to try one on each wrist, blue on the left, orange on the right. Since these perfumes have been discontinued for over 20 years, I have no idea whether they still smell the way they did back in the 20th century, but they’re both unique. I think what impresses me most is that they match the bottles so perfectly, creating the impression of ancient perfumes that were discovered in an archaeological dig, perfumes that have hunkered down and survived underground for thousands of years, ever since they were used by a long-dead bathing beauty. I’m blown away!

Both perfumes have an odd, dusty, musty base that reminds me of earth, stone, sandalwood incense, and wood that has been preserved by a desert climate for millennia. On top of this common theme, the perfume in the blue bottle is spicy, with cinnamon, dried roses, and other things that I can’t begin to identify. The perfume in the orange bottle is softer and fruitier, with anise-like notes. Both are absolutely unique and both are lovely in their own way. As they warm up on my skin, they produce an amazingly beautiful combined sillage. Jaded perfumista that I am, it’s not often that a perfume evokes deep emotions, but these two manage to do it.

Maybe the thing that moves me the most is that, without intentionally doing so, I am wearing both of these perfumes on mother’s day. Could it have been a subconscious desire to celebrate the fact that my mother realized her lifelong dream of visiting Israel a few years ago, shortly before she became too sick to travel? This trip was all she wanted to talk about on my last visit with her, so her memories are fresh in my mind.

So on this mother’s day 2011, I’ll celebrate my mother’s life, her memories, and the serendipitous enjoyment of two surprising perfumes that have unexpectedly come to symbolize my mother and her dreams.

RAMBLINGS ON PATCHOULI

I have several items ready for posting on the blog, since I always work on multiple entries in parallel. Now that I’ve recovered from a particularly nasty bout of flu, I was trying to decide which one to use, and was a little dismayed to find that every one of them was complaining about something. Not wanting to start the new year on a completely negative note, I decided to start from scratch, inspired by a perfume that I’m sampling today that isn’t all that remarkable in and of itself, but contains a note that I’m fond of even though I haven’t used it much in my own compositions.

I recently got a sample of Aesop Marrakech, an all-natural EdT made by an Australian company. I guess it’s supposed to represent a Morrocan spice market. It starts out strong, herbal, and slightly spicy with notes of anise, cumin, coriander, cardamon and cloves. The anise note quickly fades away, leaving the sturdier, woodier spices along with a slightly floral-soapy note and a hint of patchouli. The initial impression is dry and transparent, like standing near a homemade soap and potpourri stand at an outdoor craft fair, the kind that sells rough-cut soap with lots of little shreds of unidentifiable plant debris embedded in it. After an hour there’s not much left except patchouli. The patchouli floats around as an all-pervasive sillage, evoking memories of a perfume my mother had when I was a child.

My mother’s perfume came in a plain square bottle with a simple label that said Oriental. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist any more. It was patchouli with a subtle floral and woody accompaniment, it was magic in a bottle, and I absolutely loved it. I would sneak into the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet where she kept it and put it on. She and everyone else in the house must have known, because you can’t miss patchouli if it’s anywhere within 500 meters, but no one ever said anything. My other prominent memory of patchouli is that of a German colleague who always doused himself in patchouli, so you could smell him if he was anywhere in the building or approaching the building. I don’t have particularly fond memories of the person, but I did enjoy his perfume as long as it was at a sufficient distance.

So what is this patchouli stuff? The essential oil is distilled from the leaves of a plant in the mint family, Pogostemon cablin that grows in India and elsewhere. It looks a little like the lemon balm that I grow in my garden. Because it’s a small green plant, it’s a quickly renewable resource, and that’s an exceedingly good thing in this world of overconsumption and exploitation of resources. Patchouli has such a characteristic smell that it’s hard to describe in any other terms. It’s a class of its own like “citrus” or “floral” or “vanilla”. It was abused so much back in the 1960s and 1970s that it is forever doomed to carry the stigma of being a “hippie” or “headshop” scent.

I have yet to make a perfume in which patchouli is prominent, although I have used it to sharpen and round out other notes, always keeping it below the threshold at which it pops out as unmistakably patchouli. One of these days I may try to recreate my mother’s patchouli, or at least the version of it that is permanently imprinted on my olfactory memory.

[Images of Acre Spice Market and Pogostemon cablin adapted from Wikimedia]