“By way of explaining what we are about to do, I am first going to tell you a little bit about the country called Tibet.”~ Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks
I love Film Noir. I have been a sucker for detective stories since I read my first Nancy Drew when I was seven. The sad, isolated, embittered and chain smoking detectives, the loyal and dedicated Girl Fridays, the vulnerable (and possibly duplicitous) femmes (fatale). It doesn’t matter that there’s a formula. A good noir can either completely follow the formula (Chinatown, Brick) or totally break from it (Memento, The Usual Suspects); I love them all.
I’ve also mentioned my love stories about the inexplicable, the macabre, and the strange. The combination of these two fascinations is no better merged than in the early 1990s cult classic television series, Twin Peaks. I own all of Twin Peaks and still watch it, frequently sucking in new fans who are too young to remember anything on TV in the early 1990s. I still can’t believe, looking back, that something so strange and wonderful and unique ever made it onto network television, even for a season and a half.
Some perfumes are like that. They are entirely unique and interesting. Andy Tauer makes a lot of really unique fragrances that take you someplace “both strange and wonderful,” as Agent Cooper might say. Piguet Fracas is also like that, or Caron Tabac Blond. Another one of these truly unique fragrances is, appropriately enough, Ava Luxe Fim Noir.I had to take the description of Film Noir from The Perfumed Court because, like my beloved Wild Blackberry Musk, Film Noir is already discontinued. Film Noir is “a dark, haunting, dramatic leather scent with notes of leather, hemlock, spruce, amber, olibanum, coumarin, tobacco, and tonka. It is an eau de parfum, edp.”
Film Noir is a fascinating experience. It’s hard to say if it’s masculine or feminine, really, because it seems too alien for either in some ways. On me, the initial experience is a mixture of the smell of iron shavings, like the metallic tinge in the air of a factory, and oranges. One imagines this might be the way the world smells to an overworked airplane mechanic at some small airfield that services crop dusters that are old and badly in need of maintenance somewhere in the Florida. Surrounded always by the smell of metal on metal, old and cracking leather seats, hot rubber melting over and over again in the 100+ degree heat, he takes a second to wipe his brow and looks toward the citrus groves off in the distance, wondering why he thought he’d end up owning one of those when he came here, rather than working on the broken down planes of the handful of single family farms desperately trying to cling to survival.Then the scent shifts, and I get a different kind of metal, coppery, like sucking pennies. The rubbery part is stronger here, too, so that it's like imagining an old prize fighter who placed one bad bet he couldn’t cover too many, and the smell is the taste in his mouth as he hits the hot, steam concrete of the parking lot behind the bar where the men owes money to caught up with him, like they were always going to.
Next I get a strangely sterile smell, like the smell I associate with a hospital. You know the smell, that overly clean astringent smell, the one that indicates that Bad Things happen here, and like Lady MacBeth’s hands, no amount of washing will ever get the damned place clean.
Finally, it settles into little bits of sweetness – it’s the tonka and tobacco at last, I think – that makes me think of all those film noir scenes in bars with atmospheric light and hushed voices, places you think would be best long forgotten, where the troubled nurse their secret shames and try to forget what they always remember. The tobacco smells delightfully feminine to me, here, and vulnerable. It’s that femme fatale again, slowly inhaling from her cigarette holder and exhaling slowly as the director shoots a close up of the smoke escape her wet lips.In short, Film Noir is an exquisite and interesting scent. It might be one of the most interesting and difficult to describe scents I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing, one that is more about setting a mood than trying to create a specific moment or memory. I would kill to own this one...which is why I am feeling fairly homicidal toward Ava Luxe right now.
Every time I love an Ava Luxe scent and get around to posting about it, the scent has already been discontinued. Luckily I have a 30ml of the aforementioned Wild Blackberry Musk, but I have a measly 1ml sampler of Film Noir, which just KILLS me. My advice, when it comes to Ava Luxe scents, is that if you get a sample, try it immediately. If you like it – don’t think – just reach for your wallet. Far too often, the wonderful creations that come from Ava Luxe disappear, like the real villains in those old-time-y noirs. And once gone, you’re never getting them back. You can forget it, Jake. In the world of perfumery, it’s Chinatown.
"Shadow in my house.
The man he has brown eyes.
She'll never go to Hollywood.
Love moves me."
- "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart," Julee Cruise
Want more? Try…
~ a review from I Smell, Therefore I Am
Images courtesy of Twin Peaks (top right) and Jim Ferreira, who creates fabulous Classic Hollywood Glamour & Film Noir Cinema Portraits in San Francisco, CA.
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