Robert Piguet Fracas
“Can you fix this? It's a broken heart.
It was fine, but it just fell apart.
It was mine, but now I give it to you,
’cause you can fix it, you know what to do.”
Growing up, there was a huge beautiful gardenia tree in the backyard of my grandmother's house. It was a lovely and beautiful tree. I remember the smell very vividly. There were also several gardenias and magnolias and tuberoses and other white flowers, hot weather blooming and scent steaming up in the East Texas humidity, along the road that lead to the middle of nowhere Saratoga, Texas where my great-grandmother and great-aunt lived once. It feels like an entirely different life now, the little girl who used to run down those dirt roads, sometimes with shoes and sometimes without them, or biking round a dirt loop, turning back at the church before you hit the highway, where every house I passed was peopled with someone I shared blood, and therefore love, with.
I’m on my own now. I live out here in the desert all alone and there are no flowers worth speaking of; the landscapers have well taken care of that. When I look back, I can scarcely believe that I used to be part of a family large enough that we could fill a multiple room house and overflow it. I talk to them sometimes, via the electronic impulses that allow us to pretend we still know each other across thousands of miles and years of distance, but the intimacy is mostly a fiction we create inside our own heads and hearts.
No, intimacy requires you bleed for the thing, that you make yourself vulnerable. You commit something real. That’s why I still write letters. If no one ever puts pen to paper, how will you know how they feel? You can’t smear electronic ink with tears. You can't press halfway through an electronic piece of paper with decades of fermenting rage. You can’t see where someone struggled to find the right words to say; there are no digital cross outs or corrections to be seen.
When I want to write like that, I want a scent that reflects the complication of emotion that loving people, who are by nature imperfect, requires. I want to see my heart on the page, and I’d like to make sure that olfactory memory ties to the vulnerability conveyed, the openness required to be honest. I want, in short, something that smells like home, to haunt my pen, to color my heart, and perhaps to spray on letters like USO girls and war brides used to do.
When I feel this way, one of the scents I find most appropriate is
Robert Piguet Fracas, created by Germaine Cellier in 1948. Fracas is loved and hated, seemingly in equal measure. It’s one of those scents so notorious that it seems everyone has had something interesting to say (see below). Chandler Burr, in delving into Fracas history,
explains, “There are perfume legends, there are perfumer legends, and then there are perfumes that become obsessions. Fracas is all three, which is a hat trick less common that you’d think.” The
name, Fracas, is from the French “fracasso” from the Italian “fracassare,” meaning “to make an uproar.” In English, a fracas is “a noisy, disorderly fight or quarrel; a brawl.” And if that doesn’t describe family, I don’t know what does.
Robert Piguet Parfums
describes Fracas this way:
Classic femininity and modern sensibility collide within this lush white floral fragrance. Seductive tuberose mingles with jasmine, jonquil, gardenia, Bulgarian rose and orange flower in a profusion of fragile white flowers before revealing a base of sandalwood, vetiver and musk. Fracas is the signature fragrance for those who want to make an unforgettable impression.
Notes – top: Bergamont, Mandarin, Hyacinth; Middle: Tuberose, Gardenia, Jonquille, Orange Flower, Rose, Violet, Neroli; Base: Sandalwood, Musk, Vetiver.
On me, Fracas begins a little sunny and coconut, like a beach scent, but quickly becomes a lovely white flower scent. I get a lot of gardenia with the tuberose on me, pretty and realistic, and then it turns again. The musk comes through like a rubber kick, and then it turns sweet. It turns and turns, again and again. In one moment, sweet and innocent, in another moment loud and brash and in your face, and then in the next, bitter and rubbery and hard to take.
It’s like loving someone you have no choice but to love because blood and history dictate you do even when nothing else would bind you. Sometimes you can’t take it, because the relationship is both constant and constantly changing, and therefore difficult and complicated, but nonetheless unending. But then, that’s family. You can cut them off, but you can’t root them out. Pruned back branches of a family tree don’t undo the roots. So you love them, even as you leave them, or they leave you. You may never speak again, but you love them. And, if you are honest, you wish them well.
And if a scent can represent all that for you, then isn’t it worth owning?
Fracas is available for purchase all over the place: Bergdorf Goodman, Henri Bendel, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Barneys, Sephora. It’s even available through Amazon. It’s waiting for you. Go get it, but be well forewarned: a little bit of Fracas goes a long way. Again, just like time spent with family.
”We stood outside in the summer rain.
Different people with a common pain.
A simple box in the hard red clay
is where we left him to always remain.
Let your love cover me
like a pair of angel wings.
You are my family.
You are my family.
– “Family,” Dar Williams
My appreciation for
Piguet Fracas is something widely shared, as is the need to tell singular stories about it. I’ve included some favorite quotes from their stories in an effort to encourage you to read them.
~ A great piece on feminism and perfume from
The Examiner, written by
Pink Manhattan.
~ An
amazing article on another author’s relationship with Fracas: “Works of art capable to bring us to the level of catharsis are few: poems, plays, songs, symphonies, paintings or now films they remain the legacy of giants, the Homer, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mozart or van Gogh.”
~ A
review from Robin at Now Smell This! “The ladies behind the counter start coughing and gasping for air, then laughing and whispering and eyeing the poor offender, who wonders if 2 sprays could reasonably warrant such an exaggerated reaction?”
~ A
review from Bois de Jasmin: “While some recoil in horror at the thought of being smothered in its heady embrace, others lose themselves in its sensual layers.”
~ A
review from Sakecat’s Scent Project
~ A
song and story of Fracas from Boomtown Boudoir: “The entire bathroom reeked of gardenias and bad-idea sex.”
~ A
review from Perfume-Smellin’ Things: “Fracas is an olfactory equivalent of a stunning, strong-willed, supremely confident, sharply dressed blonde.”
~ A
review from Sweet Diva: “I can see why someone who’s trying to change her life, maybe growing up a bit, trying to pull herself together, would choose to wear this fragrance.”
~ A
review from Aromascope.
~ According to
Ayala’s Smelly Blog: “Fracas from French translates straightforwardly to “crash” but more specifically - a noisy, disorderly quarrel, fight or disturbance (which is what could possibly happen if this perfume is applied in abundance by a government employee in Canada). If worn in a different setting, the disturbance is bound to be rather pleasant.”
~ Last, but never least, a
review from Grain de Musc reveals “This vague whiff of death, which reminds of the destiny of all living things, even the most radiant, is associated to the aphrodisiac reputation of white flowers.”
Ah, L’Artisan Verte Violette! Here was a lovely violet I could see the beauty in. L’Artisan describes Verte Violette as follows: 
