"My Own Private Classic" by Ambre Gris

My classic scent?
I could name... Good Lord!... quite a few fragrances, in, fact.
Dreamy – Après l’Ondée, droplets of iris, whispers of violet, fairies dancing on their toes, Satie performing his Gnossiennes.
Nostalgic – Scherrer’s Nuits Indiennes, R.I.P. a refined oriental, my take-it-with-me-to-a-desert-island perfume. Gone, gone, gone… sniff.
Emotional – the marvelous Heure Bl…
No.
I’ve got it.
The perfume that cradles my earliest memories, the one that has surrounded me since I was a child, my own private madeleine…
Calèche.

It has been my mother’s olfactory signature for as long as I can remember; her rare infidelities never lasted very long. And she wears it out of nostalgia for her grandmother, who adopted it when it first came out, in 1961.
My great-grandmother Apollonie couldn’t have made a better choice: Calèche is a marvelous scent. The first full-scale fragrance launch by the house of Hermès, after three exclusive scents available only from their own boutiques, this composition by the great Guy Robert (Madame Rochas) was conceived with a dual goal: elegance, first and foremost, but accessibility, too – it had to be pleasing.

In a post-N°5 world, elegance meant “aldehyde floral”; so Calèche was composed within that framework. But where Chanel’s emblematic scent played off the overdose effect, Hermès’s version is a miracle of balance. While it opens with a recognizable whiff of citrus and aldehyde notes, with their characteristic soap/orange/clothing-iron scent, Calèche then evolves towards a perfectly melded heart, where no one note is louder than any other. Rose, jasmine and iris fuse into a sleek, homogenous and delicately powdery bouquet that never shake off the light aldehydes. The first signs of a gently chypre base are already pushing through, but the truth is, the chypre facet is subtle: the oak moss doesn’t really dare to spread its earthy accents out frankly, it simply whispers among the warm, mellow base notes, paired to the green, metallic bitterness of a fairly perceptible vetiver, and shaded with an infinitesimal suede note.

Hermès had perfect aim: with everything in perfect order, the elegantissime Calèche could be the olfactory synonym of “good taste”, the perfumers’ equivalent of a beige cashmere twinset and a pearl necklace.
The years have gone by, as have the bottles and… the reformulations: Calèche is, alas, one of those classic scents that has taken a beating over time. It’s true that its almost palpable age (nearly a half-century old), was putting a distance between it and its former accessibility… Q.E.D.? The current silky formula has lost a good part of its mellowness somewhere along the line, while a considerably more noticeable vetiver bestows a certain rigidness that was absent from the – deliciously feminine – original formula.
Still, the evolution isn’t tragic, I don’t think, for anyone but those who remember the earlier versions. While it might not be a masterpiece in this latest guise, Calèche still has lovely swaths of its former glory.

My future classic?

Can classics only be perceived with a certain perspective? I would have a hard time naming a single recent scent that could be the role model of tomorrow… But my picks of the moment are: Annick Goutal’s equally excellent Matin d’Orage and Ninfeo Mio, remarkable reinterpretations of classic structures; and Cartier’s La Treizième Heure, an extraordinary leather/smoky-tea scent that I find absolutely bewitching.