Today, a curious lilac tree offered me an exceptional olfactory experience. It was not the regular scent but a pure white narcissus (Narcissus poeticus) fragrance that the purple blossoms distilled. It was not an illusion or a nuance but rather a clear note with the typical animalic accent. After the narcissus side a white-soapy jasmine followed with a typical clean powdery note, not sweet. There was no particular green note, nor the sweet anisic side. The background of the flower reminded me the typical white soap smell from the past (a floral fragrance type very common, somewhere between lilac-lily of the valley and jasmine).This lilac remembered me a very old, classic base from de Laire - Lilas triple. It was an unusual lilac note, not the delicate floral Lilas VII, but a strong and animalic lilac with the very characteristic p-cresol note (and derivates). P-cresol and esters (with their horse like and almost urine shade) were used a lot in classic perfumery to duplicate the narcissus/jonquil note, often built around an orange flower note (like in Narcisse Noir-Caron). Those molecules give power to the natural ylang-ylang note. But in Lilas triple they produced an unusual and strong effect. Now it's not as unusual for me as I found a natural lilac with a narcissus note. Because perfumery is an art, exaggeration is sometime used to put an accent and go beyond the inspiration. That purple pink lilac with its white flower + narcissus scent reminded me of the floral note used in My sin (Lanvin) and Narcisse Blanc (Caron). They are not lilac notes, but the white flowers combined with narcissus notes gave a similar effect to the purple grape I smelled.
Describing a fragrance (past or present) is a difficult job of precision. One should think inspiration (what it smells like) and composition (what it contains). Finding the right smell from nature that inspired a creation is a useful task to understand the perfumer's mind.
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
