‘The bright air hangs freely near your newly cut hair
It is so easy now to see gravity at work in
your face
Easy to understand time, that dark process
To accept it as a beautiful process, your face’
(From ‘Lines Depicting Simple Happiness’ by Peter Gizzi)
What do you think about when
you hear the word stash I wonder?
Secretive hiding places, drugs, hidden money, valuables, recreational drugs? A
shockingly good scent launched by one of the most iconic television actresses
of all time? I thought not.
A really interesting addition
to my perfume collection is Stash SJP
the latest perfume endeavour by well-noted scent lover Sarah Jessica Parker. Her
involved adventures in perfume were more than adequately documented by Chandler
Burr in his breathlessly detailed book ‘The Perfect Scent’ that followed the
creation of Parker’s hugely successful Lovely
in collaboration with Coty and Jean-Claude Ellena’s work on Jardin Sur Le Nil for Hermès.
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| Foxy's copy of A Perfect Scent by Chandler Burr |
I loathe the term
celebuniche, it’s an ugly word for a category of olfaction that bloggers &
vloggers (another ugly word) seem to find fascinating. Celebrity perfumes are
either good or bad just like any other, perhaps a tad more cynical but no less
brazen than the majority of most high street fare. Occasionally there are
exceptions. Some actors and models are more involved in the process, more muse
than just a PR face and body. They take an active interest in the creation of
the juice, desiring a final product that will have (hopefully) a reasonable
life reflecting a more personal and intimate facet of them. Etat Libre d’Orange are launching an
offbeat variation of this with Mr Burr, launching a scent called You Or Someone Like You inspired by
Burr’s somewhat lacklustre LA based novel published in 2009. They have form, creating the sensational Like This, a pumpkin, immortelle and
ginger-tinted perfume inspired by Tilda Swinton and her alien, golden glow. Eau de Protection was a blood-stained
rose and chocolate hymn to the angular sensual power of Spanish actress Rossy
de Palma. Alan Cumming worked closely with Christopher Brosius to achieve the
peaty, whisky come hither nostalgia of Cumming
and although I didn’t really like it very much it was obvious how much Richard
E. Grant relished being part of the creation of his smartly arranged Jack and Covent Garden perfumes.
Catherine Deneuve’s bold blonde chypré Denueve originally launched in 1986 was
a fragrance I wore and loved lavishly during my Paris years in ‘89/’90; it
echoed the aloof demeanour of Deneuve mixed with her love of Chanel with a beautiful
use of civetty musks, rose, hyacinth and the dry grace of oakmoss. Deneuve’s
involvement in the composition, packaging and ad campaign of the perfume with
Avon was well advertised at the time.
One of the big surprises
recently was how beautiful Original by Anja
Rubik was; a gorgeous amber-spiced white lily composition made with creamy skill
and subtlety. I will admit to a HUGE crush on Adam Levine for Women made by the wonderful Yann Vasnier, I’m four
bottles down, the microphone-shaped bottle is fabulously fun but the perfume is
seriously good. Indian jasmine, marigold, benzoin, vanilla and rose. It’s so
addictive; I could drown in it. The men’s is good too, but the vanillic veil of
cashmere soft woods and balms in the women’s version just gets me.
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| SJP montage by TSF Original images HBO & Mario Testino |
Now, arguably many of the
above and the astonishing amount of neon, tooth achingly sweet and frankly egotistical
and forgettable celebrity juice that has been spilled, sprayed, over-promoted
and vanished would not really exist if not for the enormous success and
credibility afforded to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely. In The Perfect Scent
she revealed how she used her skin as an olfactory palette, mixing Bertrand
Duchaufour’s mournful Avignon for
Commes de Garçons with Bonne Bell Skin Musk a cheap as chips drugstore skin oil
and Egyptian Musk oil to create her own unique aroma. What was interesting in The Perfect Scent was the revelation
that Lovely was the polar opposite of
this mix and in many ways Parker was guided to launch a scent that was
infinitely more commercial and in keeping with her public persona as Carrie
Bradshaw and the glossy, often thankless roles she played in Hollywood movies. She was always much more than this; an
erudite intensely private woman with a lovely successful marriage to fellow
actor Mathew Broderick and super cute twins.
Lovely was
made with Laurent Le Guernec and Clément Gavarry, both gifted perfumers; Clément
made the amazingly leftfield Panorama
for Olfactive Studio. That wasabi note made for one of the most beautiful
openings in any scents I’ve smelled recently. Next came Covet with Frank Voelkl, who masterminded many of the culty La Labo
perfume including Limette 19 San
Francisco, Benjoin 37 Moscow, Ylang
49, Santal 33 and Iris 39. Covet didn’t perform quite so well, it’s a pity
really, it is a weird and thrilling lichen chocolate fougère thing with a
compelling teak wood & amber base. Ann Gottlieb co-designed it, which I
think may again have led to its slightly odd commercial vs. idiosyncratic
collision. I loved it though, flaws and all. Lots of people didn’t. I don’t
think the bottle helped, an absinthe-green, squashed floral-faucet hybrid. I
feel too that perhaps Covet was ahead
of it’s time as SJP started flexing at the walls of what might be possible in
her olfactory world. The woods were meaty and that spiky-herbal mint cocoa
hybrid note in the top smelled perhaps a little too personal.
 |
| Stash SJP (Image ©TSF) by Sarah Jessica Parker |
When Stash finally launched last year she freed herself to talk about
the long gestation of this deeply personal scent that predated Lovely in her mind it seemed. Stash was that fusion of memory,
pungency, skin and sensuality she had been looking for but had been deemed too
risky and ‘unisex’ for the time.
“Lovely is, precisely, what I hoped for, “ she
said calmly. “If I get the opportunity, my next scent will be will be
genderless. Fuller. Riskier..”
(From ‘The Perfect Scent’ by Chandler Burr)
It is intriguing to imagine
all this time since Lovely, via Covet and the rather lightweight NYC
line that SJP has been pondering the creation of this quite fascinating
fragrance that with or without her name attached is just beautiful piece of mucky
moreish olfaction. I have given it blind to ten people and asked opinions. One
hated the overt woodiness and what he called the ‘forest weight’ of it.
Everyone else was overwhelmingly positive about the strangeness, sexiness,
sweatiness, repeatedly returning to tester strip or skin to inhale some more.
On being told it was Stash by SJP
nearly everyone was delighted, two or three not really surprised how good it
was as her reputation as someone who understands scent is quite well
documented. My close friend Mr E of Jorum
Laboratories loved it and he’s a tough scented nut to crack these days; but
even he was really impressed by the assembly of notes and unusual erosion on
skin and fabric.
I love Stash; it really wowed me when I first tried it. I bought it blind;
it’s reasonably priced and I had birthday money to use. There’s lovely
attention to detail in the bottle and packaging. SJP is no longer with Coty and
it kinda shows; Stash feels more
feral. The bottle is quite heavyweight, like an old-style apothecary flacon,
the juice cognac-tinted and according to Jon Dinapolis, Creative
Director of SJP, the cap is based on old-fashioned cork stoppers. My favourite
part of the overall design is the rather odd gaffer tape style label that slashes
diagonally across the bottle like a Goth prom sash. Dinapolis said that due to
the nature of the project and the look SJP wanted each piece of tape was hand
ripped and hand applied.
In an interview for Coveteur by Emily Ramshaw, SJP said:
‘I knew that I wanted a teeny bit of cognac, a teeny bit of leather, a
teeny bit of body odour.’
Well, these are not
technically listed notes in Stash but
they haunt its edges like the memories of past indiscretions. The main effect in the scent is massoia, such
an addictive weird facet, used magnificently in Santal Massoia by Jean-Claude Ellena in the Hermessence series for
Hermès. Massoia wood is actually
completely prohibited in perfumery as it so allergenic on skin in even the
smallest amounts, but the smell is a cocooning lacteous wonder. Jean-Claude Ellena achieved his glorious
creamy effects with a variety of sandalwood materials, fascinated by the linear
quality of the massoia. So, even though
it listed as a note in Stash it is
likely to be an accord unless IFF has a stable and workable captive. Whatever it is, it’s gorgeously milky and
pheronomic with a metallic, lived in quality.
The body odour thing SJP has discussed in interviews is not the cumin
bangs oud in the dark thing you get with a lot of modern so-called skank stuff,
but a really moving, impression of a wearing the essence of someone else’s skin
and truffly odour they have left behind on sweaters, nightwear and rumpled
t-shirts. There is longing in the tactile grubby drawl of the fade. Massoia
accords always smell like coconut to me, but slightly oily and queasy, not the
fresh tropical buzz one might expect. This exalts the borrowed skin facet as
well.
 |
| SJP (lensed by Testino) Montage by TSF |
Black pepper, sage and a
quiet patchouli note also bolster SJP’s vision of her unisex riskiness and enveloping
fever. There is a very elegant frankincense note in the base, a reference to
her beloved Avignon that plumes over
a deeply sexy Atlas cedar note. Mr E. told me that he thinks of cedar as a
feminine wood and men are drawn to the scent on skin and likewise sandalwood is
a masculine wood and women find the scent of it very sensual on men’s skin. The
massoia in Stash may have been
created out of sandalwood materials so mixing it with Atlas cedar; a wood with
a sweet balsamic personality makes for a giddy, sexy brew.
The constant shift of gender
in Stash as opposed to the
mundaneness of dullard unisex concoctions is what makes the perfume so
arresting to wear. It is very hard not to overdose, I find myself looping the
bottle around my neck and over my hair several times as I spray. The top notes
are wonderfully brisk, huge grinds of black pepper over acerbic grapefruit and
that humming swell of sage leading into the languid bed stretch between
truffled patchouli and SJP’s fetish frankincense smoke. Slippery musks and just
enough oily nuttiness from a suggested pistachio effect only serve to enhance
that lived in, morning after skin thing that SJP seemed to desire in this strange
autobiographical juice. It is this slow decent into a lived in sensual and
plaintive funk that demonstrates how expertly composed Stash is; mixing a woman’s desire to be louche and aroused whilst
losing herself in her own closely guarded stash of memories.
As long as they make Stash I will wear it; it is wonderful to
find something unique and personal made by a collective of noses and
actor/writer/model etc who has genuinely immersed themselves in the olfactive
process with such intimate commitment and joy. In the case of Stash, like fine wine or deep amber malt
whisky, the idea has been macerating for years. It was worth the wait, it would
have very sad for SJP to have pushed through the launch of this instead of Lovely all those years ago, for it would
have surely been met with puzzlement and commercial failure. Now however her
status as an icon of elemental statement style and the ever widening distance
from SATC have allowed Sarah Jessica Parker to launch a fascinating and
beguiling perfume that succeeds in surprising, seducing and shocking just a
little each time you wear it.
For more information on Sarah Jessica Parker fragrances, please click on the link below:
©The Silver Fox March 2017
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