Narcisse Noir by Caron

One of the few perfumes that leave me torn between consternation and admiration; sometimes it’s a masterpiece, other times it gives me a fright when I smell it. If a perfume were subjected to a psychiatric diagnosis, 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 The Sunset of the Gods. Now I understand why it fits that character: dark and grotesque like her mansion, morbid in 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 unusual 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 by incense, combined with the base ‘mousse de saxe’ from Caron (his guerlinade), which smells of damp moss, mould, and sweet chestnuts, ending up smelling of an ashtray full of cigarette butts, dead skin, and forgotten candy wrappers in a dirty fireplace extinguished twenty years ago. It was a sales success, imitated until Caron won lawsuits against plagiarists; Ernst Beaux, creator of Chanel No. 5, called it ‘a parfum d’une vulgarité tapegeuse’ (deafening vulgarity). There’s a myth that Diaghilev forced his dancers to wear it before every show, even Nijinski. Stars like Teda Bara and Tallulah Bankhead used it with their threatening gaze in khol, imitating Cleopatra and Mata Hari. Gradually Narcisse Noir became synonymous with sinister and sexual, not helped by the 1947 film about corrupted nuns with a poster that looks like The Joker as a smiling nun holding a black narcissus in her fist. I wish I could wear it more at réveillon parties in the Gatsby mansion of the twenties, with hangovers and expensive fur coats absorbing sweat, soap, and smoke, but it’s a 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 become dwarfs.