We Live In a Society: Écrin de fumée by Serge Lutens

Growing up I was obsessed with magazines: their unmarred spines held the promise of a better life, and leafing through their glossy pages meant breathing in the aroma of a fresh start. Meanwhile, the contents inside mirrored the chaotic bedlam of a deeply mentally ill human brain: personality tests, sex tips, avocado hair masks, 10 ways to style a wraparound dress, DIY juice fasts, and endless things to buy. How adult! I loved gazing at the overflowing racks at Barnes and Noble, full of razor sharp pages set to expire before they were even acknowledged. That sort of built-in obsolescent felt excessively chic, as did their physicality; cold, substantial, slippery.

A fresh-printed magazine smells icy, metallic and a little sweet, like clean fur. It’s a scent that’s comforting, because it’s familiar, and optimistic, because it points to a potential outside itself. Now that I get my news from twitter I wistfully romanticize print media, the detritus of hoarders and old people, in part because magazines served as my first artistic muse: my middle school bedroom was papered with collages made of 8 1/2 x 11 xerox paper, rubber cement and cutouts from Sassy. Yes, I invented the vision board.

I spent $1000000000 to learn in an undergrad Contemporary Art History seminar that groundbreaking art practices like mine were classified as pastiche: a chaotic mix of shit smashed together to speak to each element’s origins and achieve a larger motivation. Fundamentally, this is what perfume is all about: a tool to press upon fragments of our collective nostalgia in service of a brand new fantasy.

So while all perfume operates like a magazine, there is also a genre of perfume that smells like a magazine, a favorite category of mine which is rarely discussed. Imagine almost anything you’d pick up at a duty free: best sellers by Lancôme like La Vie Est Belle, or Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle, or Tommy Girl by Tommy Hilfiger. These perfumes all have a categorically perfumey smell, sweet, fruity, and business casual. They’re frags that signal the convention and 401k-laced security of a woman with a job. The bottles are as practical and unassuming as a poly-blend pants suit, and the juice inside is the same pale coral color of a statement necklace from Talbots. You know the smell of a fat September issue of Elle, bulging with 2-ply perfume ads with those tear-away glue-scented samples? These perfumes smell like that: glossy, saccharine, and salaried. They’re executed in a contemporary, linear style indicative of a 2000s-era boxed set from Macys. They’re not aldehyde-soaked, kitchen sink 80’s chypres, but they’re also not the monosyllabic tea-scented frags you’d find at a niche perfumery.

A unique exception is Écrin de fumée by Serge Lutens, an unlikely magazine perfume by a fancy French niche house. I first smelled it at their Paris flagship where I went to pick up Jeux de peau: a warm bowl of cream of wheat swirled with whole milk and apricots. Naturally I smelled every perfume in the boutique, initially dismissing warm, syrupy Écrin in favor of dark and metallic L'Orpheline and Borneo 1834, which smells like a wet barn dusted in cocoa powder. With notes of grocery store berry jam, syrupy rum, Sees candies, and incense, Écrin de fumée is just as comforting and familiar as a duty free standby, and only twice the price. It’s “safe,” so while this would be a perfect gift for your mom or boss, I’ll concede it’s not for everyone. If you’re a niche snob looking to smell like rind-washed goat cheese, this one isn’t for you (try Marlou Ambilux), but if you want to smell like a box of Godiva chocolates, complete with notes of ribbon and glossy wrapping paper, look no further.