Bring Out Your Dead: Yardley Lotus

Anybody who knows me from Perfume of Life knows that cheap, obscure Yardley Lotus is one of my all-time favorites. If you've never had the pleasure of meeting it, you have missed out on one of the best mass-produced drugstore scents of all time. It's long dead now, sad to say, though bottles do show up on eBay from time to time. Imagine a softer, drier version of Ava Luxe Lotus, and you'll have an idea of what it's like. I've got a stash that should be sufficient to last my lifetime, and I'm sure I'll wear it until I'm ready to exit the planet. In fact, I'm considering leaving instructions that my carcass be lightly spritzed with it at my funeral. It's the perfect funeral perfume, as I discovered when my father died a few years ago.

My father had been sick for years and showed every sign of enjoying a long, lingering decline, but in his usual contrary way, he surprised us. He fell ill one evening, and died alone in a hospital bed two days later. (We had a funny/sad/excruciating final encounter, which you can read about here.) Things were a little confused and hectic after his death--I supposed that's always true--and I never gave a thought to what to wear to his funeral until it was time to get dressed for it.

My father had an infuriating habit of passing harsh judgment on women's looks. No female, including me, was exempt from his snide comments. Standing in front of my closet, pondering my options, I briefly considered wearing something shapeless and comfortable, just because he would have disapproved. My inner adolescent felt the need to have the last word. Then I thought better of it. Humoring the dead is a much better strategy, since you can feel magnanimous without actually providing any satisfaction to your opponent.

I chose a black silk skirt, a dark blue velvet blouse and black suede pumps. I added an antique silver necklace and a pair of faux jet earrings, Victorian drop style. I looked nice. Dad would have thought so, too.

I surveyed the perfume shelves. This was a much tougher choice than the clothes. Not because of Dad--he had no particular opinion on perfume, or at least none he ever expressed around me. The problem was that I really wanted something familiar and comforting to get me through the next few hours, but I knew that whatever I wore would be permanently joined to my memories of this day. I'd be altering my relationship to the scent forever.

My eye fell on the bottle of Yardley Lotus. I knew the fragrance would be perfect: feminine, calming, subdued. It would make me feel better, and likely have the same effect on the people around me. I picked it up, then put it back. Only a fellow perfume nut could understand why fear made me dither. I imagined years ahead when I would never be able to smell that sweet, mild scent without flashing on my father's corpse in the coffin, the sound of my mother crying, the tense tedium of Catholic death ritual. I would be surrendering my uncomplicated pleasure in the scent to all that sadness.

The little sacrifice seemed necessary and inevitable, so I reached for the bottle. It was, in a way, a gesture of reconciliation to my father. Even though it would have meant nothing to him, I felt I was offering him something I valued, a farewell gift.

The funeral passed in a blur. I sat next to my mother, who didn't speak at all, except to say, "He was so tormented." There was a large spray of yellow roses on his coffin, which I had arranged because he liked yellow roses, but they looked ugly to me against the gray casket and I wished I had chosen something else. The priest came over to us and said something I can't recall. The burial was in the tiny cemetery next to the church, and seemed to take forever. We had to brace ourselves against the wind, which was blowing violently out of the south.

The perfume was there through it all, wafting up to me like a consoling friend. I had never thought of it as a spiritual scent, but it was spiritual in the midst of all that ceremony. There was a subdued, warm light in the church, and the perfume became golden to me--a quality it retains to this day.

I was right about the fragrance being permanently marked by the sadness of death. It's scarred now, imperfect, but no less beautiful. It has a richness for me it never had before. There was a time when I might have outgrown it, moved beyond it, but that won't happen now. It's inscribed with a piece of my life.



Illustration from Flora de Filipinas, Francisco Manuel Blanco, circa 1880. Image from Wikimedia Commons,

Bring Out Your Dead: Maja, Myrurgia

Yes, I know, strictly speaking Maja is still alive, but the near-criminal reformulation inflicted on it a few years ago has killed it for me, so it makes my roster of the departed.

Maja, for those not lucky enough to have known it in its original state, was a rich, spicy floral. It was one of those perfectly blended wonders that is difficult to describe, but Dioressence comes darn close to being its twin. Maja was just a bit deeper, with distinct carnation and green notes and touch of vetiver in the base. Its tweaked personality is a drastic change, modern and cold in all the places where the original was warm and sensual. Today's Maja is a thin swill that one Basenotes reviewer aptly compared to cheap aftershave.


Maja was launched in 1921, and I have no idea whether it ever had a life as a luxury scent. By the time I came across it in the 1970s it was a drugstore standard, inexpensive but acceptable in polite company, like Emeraude or Yardley English Lavender with a slightly more exotic allure. I know I bought my first bottle at a Rexall in Nashville. Whenever I had to cash to blow I'd head straight there and buy something--anything--to feed my budding cosmetics addiction. Anybody remember Allercreme or Angel Face makeup, or Helena Rubenstein skin care? God, I loved all that stuff.

Of course, I bought fragrances, too, and one day nestled alongside the Jovans and Cotys I saw a cheap gift set of Maja perfume and soap. I'd never smelled it, but I loved the trademark packaging, which reminded me of a treasured doll one of my uncles brought me from Spain when I was small. The moss-green color of the juice was was alluring, too, so like any reckless little perfume freak I snatched up the unsniffed bargain.

I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. It was full-bodied and sexy, so unlike the girlish musks and white florals--Tatiana, anyone?--that were all the rage at the time. Although its composition was completely different, its character reminded me a little of my great perfume love, My Sin. Maja was earthier, though, and less refined than the Lanvin. My Sin evoked the soulful aspect of sex, while Maja was all heart. Its smooth drydown made me think of the warm, velvety skin at the top of a woman's thigh next to her furred mons. (Is that too much information?)

I wore Maja off and on all through high school and college. It was a bit of a guilty pleasure, since it was so cheap and old fashioned, with none of the classic cachet of My Sin or my other beloved oldie, Chanel no. 5. Whenever anybody came in my dorm room and saw it I'd invariably get a "What's that?" I don't think it ever garnered a single compliment. Still, I never stopped loving it, and I was really distressed when it suddenly became difficult to find. I wandered around discount stores and flea markets all through the 80s and 90s looking for it without any luck. I'm sure there were bottles around but I never happened upon one, and no one I asked had ever heard of it.

This was my first experience of the agonized quest so familiar to all vintage perfume lovers. If you think about it, it's astonishing that we are able to maintain a passion for something as trivial as a perfume for decades, especially when clones and cousins abound for pretty much every scent. But nothing ever replaces The One, and the joy of finding it after the long hunt is as much a reward as the scent itself. I got my moment of joy sometime around 1997 in a cosmetic store in Rockville, Maryland, when I found a one ounce bottle of Maja PdT that looked as if it had been sitting on the shelf for years. It is no exaggeration to say my heart leaped when I reached out to take possession of it.

Such drama, alas, is a thing of the past. You can find almost any forgotten perfume on eBay these days, and it can be yours with no agony at all, unless you count the unpleasantness of paying through the nose. I shelled out a ridiculous amount for an old bottle of Maja EdP on eBay a while back. It's beautiful, but I have to say that I got a lot more pleasure out of stumbling upon some old Mexican-made gift sets at a Big Lots store here in Tennessee. (FYI, the Mexican Maja, if you can find it, is inferior to the juice imported from Spain, but still light years better than the reformulation.)

Unlike some of my other discontinued loves, I've got enough original Maja to see me through the rest of my perfume-wearing life. That's probably a waste. Lovely as it is, its erotic charge makes it hard for me to imagine dousing myself with it when I'm 80--but who knows?


Majas on a Balcony, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (?), 1800-1814. Image from Web Gallery of Art.

Bring Out Your Dead: Natural High, Garden Botanika

When I said I was going to start this series with a beloved unknown, I wasn’t kidding. I think I might be the only person in the world who still owns any Natural High. It dates from the days when Garden Botanika had lots of storefronts in upscale malls. I don’t think GB even has any brick-and-mortar stores anymore, though it is still sold online and through Ulta. Natural High was a limited edition scent, issued just before the empire went more or less belly up, so there can’t be more than a handful of bottles out there.

I bought mine at the Galleria in Houston, a mecca of high-end consumerism if there ever was one. The Galleria is the kind of place where a fender bender in the parking lot is guaranteed to involve a large Mercedes, and the stores are full of expensively dressed women with frozen faces. At least, that’s how it was in 2000 when I wandered in one dreary November afternoon.

Dave had taken an apartment in Houston, partly because he had a big client there, and partly because we were contemplating divorce. He was coming home maybe one weekend out of six, and I had gone down there to see him and hash over the things people hash over during such times.

Dave calls Houston the land of perpetual cataclysm because there’s always some epic environmental unpleasantness going on: tropical storms, floods, plagues of insects, refinery fires. The dank air is reminiscent of New Orleans, but a Houston breeze carries the acrid odor of petrochemicals instead of the sweet scent of tea olive. Whenever I’m in Houston, at some point I always catch myself trying not to breathe. The city is built on unstable soil, which means most of the neighborhoods have buckled sidewalks, and a lot of the older houses are visibly twisted on their foundations. There was a rather nice old home near Dave’s apartment that had nearly cracked in two.

Somehow all that makes the place seem a little ominous, even on a sunny day. The gray chill of late fall and our marital slough made it seem especially grim, so I went to the Galleria to blow some money and cheer myself up. I was drawn to the Garden Botanika, not so much for the sniffing, but because it was as colorful and brightly lit as a candy store. I remember sampling the scads of fragrances on offer and thinking, How on earth do they come up with this insipid stuff. Ugh!

There was a little display of scents touted as mood enhancers. Such gimmicks usually repel me, but I was desperate to find something I liked, so I sniffed. They turned out to be as crappy as everything else in the store, except for one. It opened with a rush of orange followed by something like fresh cut grass. It was sweet, but without any hint of cloying vanilla, or any of the other foodie mess that seems to infect every sweet fragrance of the past 20 years. The orange was brilliant but not overwhelming, and it faded gently into the bittersweet green note without leaving that stale residue that citrus notes sometimes do. The dry down offered a hint of fresh coconut, one of my favorite smells.

I looked at the label: “Natural High.” That was almost a deal breaker. If I’d been happy it wouldn’t really have bothered me, but since I was in fact depressed, buying it seemed too much like being suckered. Still, I loved it and couldn’t resist.

I wore it that night when we went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant with a friend of Dave’s. As it happened, it was election night: Bush v. Gore, round one—-before the tie-breaker, or the coup, depending on your point of view. And there we were, smack dab in middle of the Bush family breeding ground. The restaurant’s owner had turned on a TV set so we could watch the returns. Phil, Dave’s friend, is a white native Texan, but he speaks Japanese well enough to make his living as an translator. He was alternately yakking with the wait staff in Japanese, and leading our table in noisy insults toward Bush. The two sleek couples at the next table-—Bush lovers by birth, you could tell—-were shooting us dirty looks, which only encouraged us. (The guys, as I recall, were drinking a lot of sake. I don’t have an excuse.)

We ran the Bushies off, and hung around a while hoping the political contest would resolve. The guys drank more. I sat there sniffing my wrist, feeling, I must admit, kinda cheered up by the scent. Eventually we gave up on the election and went home to Dave’s grungy little bachelor pad. As I curled up with my pillow I was still getting whiffs of sweet orange and hay.

Of course, you know how the story turned out. Dave and I stayed married, and George Bush got to play war with real soldiers. And I have this little bottle of a happy scent to remind me of a sad time. There are maybe 20 spritzes left. I ration them carefully.




Photo of nude woman with an opium pipe by Jean Agélou, circa 1910, from Wikimedia Commons.

Bring Out Your Dead: A Perfume Series

One reason the perfume content of this blog has gotten so thin is that I'm pretty seriously out of the loop these days. It's difficult to have much to say about the new releases or the latest mutilation of a classic unless you're spending a lot of time trawling the perfume blogs, hanging out on the forums, and sampling. It's not that I don't still respect and enjoy hardcore 'fume chat. It's a huge pleasure for me to drop in at Perfume Shrine or the Posse, and I love reading the great reviews from all my old POL buddies on their blogs; but unfortunately, time and funds for perfume are both a little short, so I just can't keep up to speed well enough to enter the conversation.

I don't love my collection any less, however, and I find that my taste and responses to scent continue to evolve. Lately I've been fixated on the discontinued (or hopelessly disfigured) fragrances that I deeply love. Most of them have been part of my life for a long time, so I have a wealth of associations attached to them. Sniffing them induces instant reverie, and the memories always seem to have a particular power because they're evoked by something that is, in a sense, no longer of this world. It's a little like hearing a whispered message from a ghost.

This is the time of year when the Wheel turns toward death, diminishment and closure. Starting with Mabon (the autumnal equinox), the barrier between the living and the dead grows thinner until Samhain, when it is most easily crossed. So, with that in mind, this seems like a good time to commune with the cut flowers in my collection. Over the next few weeks I'm going to blog about some of my favorite dead perfumes. These posts won't be reviews in the usual sense--no need for that, since most of them are either well-known classics, or so obscure a review would be pointless. I'm just going to write a bit about what the fragrances mean to me, how they fit into the narrative of my life. If I do it right, they'll offer a little voyeuristic peek into the nature of scent obsession.

Mabon, of course, is still a couple of weeks away, and I'm going to wait until then to ponder the really precious juices, but look for a couple of warm-up posts in the meantime. First up will be a beloved unknown. Stay tuned ...



Still Life with a Skull, Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674).