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Emily Andrews for The New York Times
“THIS ROOM DIFFUSER IS LIKE EXCALIBUR,” said Ginger Partington, the tall and bodacious vendeuse at Twisted Lily, an upscale perfume store that has been inexorably wending its way around (I’m not going to say choking) the longtime essential-oil purveyors of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.
Ms. Partington was trying to wrest open a container whose lid was more recalcitrant, she said, than one on “a Bubbies Pickles jar.” Underneath was a Prokofiev-inflected concoction of three oranges (bitter, blood and green mandarin), but it might as well have been the cucumber, dill and Artesian well water listed on a Bubbies label.
The perfume business — once a young maiden tripping gaily through a field of flowers, then for a long while a more mature lady navigating determined department-store demonstrators wearing smocks — has over the last 20 years or so gone terribly pear-shaped. Also apple, grapefruit, mushroom and Sichuan pepper-shaped. Some current formulations are indeed indistinguishable from salads. Others, like those from CB I Hate Perfume and Le Labo, seem designed to provoke and disturb (with burning leaves and dirt, respectively) as much as entice and seduce.
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Emily Andrews for The New York Times
And there are so many new scents on the market: thousands, from the 50-odd independent lines sparklingly arrayed here to the multiple spinoffs of juggernauts like Chanel’s Coco. I guess you could say that in this, the YouTube era — like that other thing with notes, music — the fragrance industry has … atomized? Spritz! Poof!
A lot of new companies (one named Forager) are predictably concentrating in the new moneyed Brooklyn. I had begun my research across the street, at a branch of the chain Atelier Cologne, which, though its wares are made in France, looks nothing like my ideal of a refined French parfumerie. Granted, that was derived from the scene in “An American in Paris” in which Gene Kelly helps his corpulent compatriot, Madge Blake, choose from two crystal flacons (“I always get a rash if I have to decide something,” she declares from a gilded bench) so that he can better stalk the gamine shop girl, Leslie Caron.
Though sold in Bergdorf Goodman and Sephora, Atelier here cultivates a rough-hewed, one-room-schoolhouse feel, with a chalkboard enumerating the simple pricing scheme (soap $19.50, candle $55, cologne $75 and up), used books and a tableau of ruler, pencils and dice. Staff members are generally pedagogic, rattling off a long company pitch that concludes “our motto is if it exists in nature, we’re going to use it in our fragrance.”
An exception is Robert Colannino, the thoughtful store manager and a veteran of Fresh and Barneys who kindly guided a 6-year-old boy in the store through the citrus-heavy collection.
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Emily Andrews for The New York Times
“Do you like Coca-Cola?” he asked. Weaned at the Park Slope food co-op, the child stared back at him blankly.
Mr. Colannino told of witnessing a young Frances Bean Cobain having a sprayer mishap in the ’90s while her mother, Courtney Love, shopped for scent. “There was a bloodcurdling scream …” he said.
Also of the grunge era, CK One by Calvin Klein presaged Atelier Cologne’s unisex business model; the company’s scents come in flasks, not flacons, for which you can order a monogrammed leather case to obliterate all branding but your own.
While I can appreciate this egalitarian approach, my personal scents-ibility is more grounded in the ’80s “and never let you forget you’re a man” ethos, and at this Twisted Lily excels.
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Emily Andrews for The New York Times
“You’re so clever and resourceful,” Ms. Partington cooed, in arch “Total Woman” style, over the phone to her husband, Bob Partington (an inventor and host of a History Channel show, “ThingamaBob”), soliciting his advice on the stuck jar as Hall & Oates’s “Maneater” played in the background. “I sprayed some Windex in there and smushed it around,” she said.
Eventually a male customer who had honed his grip at Brooklyn Boulders, the nearby rock-climbing facility, got the diffuser open, and she promptly sold it for $70 to a woman en route to India and Cannes, France.
“Traveling with perfume can be a nightmare,” Ms. Partington said sympathetically, filling a bonus decant vial. “Pump like a bicycle tire!”
In my experience, you don’t discover perfumes in stores so much as covet them on acquaintances, then submit to disappointment as the stuff runs afoul of your own body chemistry. Still, though I gave up Earl Grey years ago, the redoubtable Ms. Partington almost sweet-talked me into a bottle of Bergamote Boisée resembling an Ellsworth Kelly sculpture. “The Rolls-Royce of bergamot,” she drawled.
But I left with a Yugo: Edith Wharton-themed bath salts ($28), a gift for a twisted Lily Bart scholar I know. Smell is other people.
