Angel by Thierry Mugler: why great perfumes smell like death
The overripe, almost rotting melon smell of Diorella by Christian Dior is widely considered to be amongst the greatest perfumes ever made.
Let that sink in.
Again: one of the most highly-regarded perfumes of all time smells like it’s been left in your fruit bowl for a week too long.
It may sound strange, but it isn’t unusual. In fact it’s a phenomenon so well documented that it became the basis for a scene in American Hustle; with Jennifer Lawrence’s character commenting:
There’s this top coat that you can only get from Switzerland, and I don’t know what I’m gonna do because I’m running out of it but I love the smell of it… Irving and I can’t get enough of it. There’s something…the top coat…it’s like perfumey but there’s also something rotten? And I know that sounds crazy but I can’t get enough of it. Smell it, it’s true! Historically, the best perfumes in the world, they’re all laced with something nasty and foul.
— or, as it’s put in the Barbara Herman review that’s thought to have inspired the speech: “Diorella shows you how to find beauty in the intersection of garbage and flowers. I know this doesn’t sound like an endorsement, but it is”
Try Diorella in Boots today and you’ll only get a hint of the funky note that made the pre-2009 formulation a classic, but dig for it — dig below what Chandler Burr fondly described as “a new fur coat that has been rubbed with a very creamy mint toothpaste” and your stomach will find it: the smell of yesterday’s melons. It’s an overripe note that, once noticed, can’t be ignored.
Once you’ve finished digging into Diorella, turn your nose to Angel by Thierry Mugler. You needn’t dig with Angel: it will dig into you. This is the perfume that kick-started the ‘gourmand’ genre of fragrances — perfumes which ground their scent in ultra-loud synthetic edibles — and Angel did it by packing such a sugary punch that everything since has felt lack-lustre and lame. If Angel were actually edible, even Slush Puppie would think its candied pineapple was a bit OTT. The surprising thing isn’t that it manages to be so sacrilegiously sugared, it’s that it still leaves you wanting more.
How? Musk, rot and damp earth.
Tania Sanchez, in her review for ‘Perfumes: The A-Z Guide’:
“Although Angel is sold as a gourmand for girls, spoken of as if it were a fudge-dipped berry in a confectioner’s shop, it’s all lies. Look for Angel’s Adam’s apple: a handsome, resinous, woody patchouli, straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men’s fragrance… The effect kills the possibility of cloying sweetness, despite megadoses of the cotton-candy smell of ethylmaltol”
The candy-floss and fruit grab your nose, but it’s the smell of sodden-earth that catches your heart; making the overall fragrance akin to a pineapple in the compost bin. Angel is black comedy: it looks like a cheap laugh, but it serves a kick of death on the side. Once you’ve caught the smell of that sweet/rot conflict, you’ll just keep on coming back.
Sanchez goes on:
“Angel [is left] in a high-energy state of contradiction. Many perfumes are beautiful or pleasant, but how many are exciting? Like a woman in a film who seethes, “He’s so annoying!” and marries him in the end, I returned to smell Angel so many times I had to buy it.”
You won’t have enough breath for this perfume, because there’s something moreish about that kick of rotten pineapple. Death is unsettling. It’s bewitching. It’s unresolved. You’ll breathe it until your ribs are full and then you’ll come back for another lungful, hungry for the resolution that keeps escaping you.
Many perfumes have tried to mimic Angel, but they all seem to miss the point: they either tone down the rot or they abandon it completely. Angel’s copy-cats are all 10-tonne flowers and sweetness with no tension, nothing left to resolve. These are the perfume equivalent of a one-line story: “once upon a time everyone lived happily ever after” — lies rendered vulgar by lack of ambition.
Angel isn’t beautiful. It isn’t even necessarily pleasant — but it is exciting. Angel asks a question: what if…? What if flowers started growing in a rubbish dump? What if death was one day undone? Angel is the smell of hope.
Like Angel, hope is moreish and bewitching. It’s sweet, but genuine hope is never sugar-coated or saccharine — it smells like garbage and flowers; its sweetness looks death square in the face. If your hope doesn’t smell like death then it lacks ambition: it hasn’t gotten its hands dirty in the countless graveyards of this world.
The most beautiful things on earth are dying, turning to compost underneath our feet. You can try and out-shout that uneasy fact, masking reality with a slug of 10-tonne sweetness as though that deals with the problem, but the end result will leave your mouth dry.
The sweetness of hope is a deeper sweetness, and it smells like rotting pineapples. Why? Because rotting fruit is the universe’s way of telling us that life can come out of death: ‘unless a pineapple falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’
Perhaps that reworking of some of Jesus’ last words seems a bit on the nose. Sacrilegious, even. But stick with me, because shortly after Jesus spoke them he would taste blood and death himself; a flower cast on the rubbish heap.
This Angel is not saccharine. He’s spoken of as though he were a meek and mild hypochondriac, but don’t believe the vulgarity and lies. His hands are dirty and he smells like rot and sugar, garbage and flowers – death and hope. No wonder he inverted the world: he has death under his fingernails. His death doesn’t come at the end of his story, but in the middle; his ambition was hope in the graveyard. Your lungs won’t be able to contain all the strength of death-then-life that he breathes.
