Narcisse Noir by Caron

One of the few perfumes that leaves me torn between consternation and admiration; sometimes it’s a masterpiece, other times it gives me a jolt when I smell it. If you put a perfume through a psychiatric evaluation, this one would already be strapped into a straitjacket at Arkham Asylum: sweet and exotic chords, incense lullabies, darkness, beast fur in a witch’s cauldron, and the deranged gaze of Norma Desmond begging for her close-up in Sunset Boulevard. Now I understand why it fits that character: dark and grotesque like her mansion, morbid from her fixation on a dead past, wandering like a lost soul. It’s the perfume vintage lovers say smells vintage. According to Hartley, the past is a foreign country; in 1911, Caron made it bizarre for our palates: sweet white flowers bathed in Bubbalicious essence syrup, similar to Poison’s neroli but with an incredibly animalic musk, like old soap cut through with incense. Paired with the base ‘mousse de saxe’ by Caron (his guerlinade), which smells like damp moss, mold, and roasted chestnuts, it ends up smelling like an ashtray full of cigarette butts, dead skin, forgotten candy wrappers in a dirty fireplace extinguished twenty years ago. It was a bestseller, imitated until Caron won lawsuits against plagiarists; Ernst Beaux, creator of Chanel No. 5, called it ‘a vulgar and deafening perfume.’ There’s a myth that Diaghilev forced his dancers to wear it before every show, even Nijinsky. Stars like Teda Bara and Tallulah Bankhead wore it, pairing its exotic, threatening gaze with khol, imitating Cleopatra and Mata Hari. Gradually, Narcisse Noir became synonymous with sinister and sexual vibes, not helped by the 1947 film about corrupted nuns with a poster resembling The Joker as a smiling nun holding a black narcissus in her fist. I wish I could wear it more at réveillon parties in a Gatsby mansion from the twenties, complete with hangovers and expensive fur coats absorbing sweat, soap, and smoke, but it’s a very specific ‘mood’; if I’m not mentally prepared, it upsets my stomach. Norma Desmond was right: ‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.’ Narcisse Noir is a Titan, and perhaps it’s our tastes that have shrunk to dwarfs.