Scentzilla!

Cacharel Pour L’Homme was suggested to me a while back as another scent created by Gerard Goupy, whose Magie Noire is a favorite of mine. (EDIT: I forgot to say thanks again to Jindra. I am so happy to have discovered this scent thanks to you!)

A very strange thing happened for me with this scent. I sprayed the scent and found it haunting, as if I had met it somewhere before, though I KNEW I hadn’t. I looked up the notes at Basenotes (link also at right) hoping to discover some clues. And… nothing. What I smelled did not precisely match up to what I was reading “on paper.” (On screen?) So I sprayed it all over me the next day. And the next. And then it hit me one morning. It reminded me of my Tom’s of Maine Fennel toothpaste. But… that wasn’t quite right. I sprayed again later in the afternoon. Wait! It’s Pernod! No, that couldn’t be right. And then it finally occured to me… this seems most likely to be a perfume ode to absinthe (the Pernod we all know nowadays is the non-brain-deteriorating version of absinthe.)

It’s aromatically dreamy and floating, but doesn’t lose its herbal tang or light wood base, reminding you that is a perfume after all. After looking through some pages that break down the chemical constituents of absinthe, like this, this, and this, I don’t feel entirely weird for claiming it as an absinthe scent. (For the record, a majority of the extremely scientific explanations do go right past my head, so I may be reading into them things that have no application to this scent.) From glancing at those pages, the notes listed by Basenotes would seem to add up to something absinthe-like on the right person’s skin.

Yet when seeking out the old ads, I discovered what seemed to be a strong marketing theme of the adventurer/traveller. How peculiar. No mention of absinthe, though one site denoted L’Homme’s bottle’s resemblence to a traveller’s water flask. Right. “Water” flask. But this marketing of the adventurer/traveller made little sense to me until I remembered one of the most infamous world travellers who had a strong penchant for absinthe:

Ernest Hemingway.

“It was a milky yellow now with the water and he hoped the gypsy would not take more than a swallow. One cap of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosks, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guaranty Trust Company and the Ille de la Cite, of Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea changing liquid alchemy.”
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, as Hemingway’s character Robert Jordan shares a canteen of absinthe with a companion.

And indeed, I perceive L’Homme as an extremely romantacized version of Papa: A scent that allows you to daydream of globe trekking, in search of both adventure and cool literary contemplations. But one that conviniently leaves out crippling plane crashes, and acrimony with writers who were former friends. It lets you forget about alcoholism, its overwhelming depressive episodes, its violence (which in Hemingway’s case included guns and throwing knives in the house) and its tragedy.

Image top is entitled The Green Muse by Albert Maignan, from feeverte.net. Image bottom is of Hemingway from crivalnestore.net.firms.com.