She says, "A girl needs a gun these days on account of the rattlesnakes."

Caron Tabac Blond parfum

Jodie wears a hat although it hasn't rained for six days...

It was hot. Incredibly hot. It was so hot that Jodie couldn’t actually remember what water tasted like, even as she drank from her canteen. Wiping her mouth against the back of her handkerchief-wrapped hand, she wondered if this summer was ever going to break. Late September already, but it felt like mid-July, with Montana seemingly hellbent on riding the year out in a relentless heat wave.

Rolling her head back against her shoulders, she sighed and gazed out across the hills, squinting to make out stray cattle as the air rose in a haze off the dirt and dead grass. The herd was restless. Too little rain meant too little food and water, which meant cranky livestock. And less money come the end of drive season, but she wouldn’t think of that now.

Readjusting in her saddle, she nudged her horse gently and they began a lazy gallop toward the highest concentration of tiny black dots etched against the horizon.

. . . . . . .

It's hard for me to peg Caron Tabac Blond. It's such a classic scent. It's ninety-one years old, for goodness sake, and therefore possible that I am, right now, wearing a scent Meangus, my grandmother, and Mother Nanny and Ain't Lee (my great grandmother/great aunt), could have also worn. (For the record, everyone in my bio-family is known primarily by some crazy nickname straight out of a Southern Gothic novel because we are, in fact, that southern. Also, trust me that no one in my family ever actually wore Tabac Blond. They were WAY too poor. Like holes-in-their-shoes, a-single-piece-of-fruit-for-Christmas, no-indoor-plumbing-or-reliable-electricity-until-the-1970s kind of poor.) So I put it on, and I try to imagine them wearing it, or women contemporary wearing it. But I just don't see it.

Then I try to picture it as it historically might have been created, in the context of the story that Caron likes to tell on their website:

To mark the dawn of feminine liberation, CARON made the bold move in 1919 of dedicating a deliberately provocative perfume to the beautiful androgynous women of the era, with their long ivory and mother-of-pearl cigarette-holders poised nonchalantly between their lips.

Tabac Blond: a subtly ambiguous fragrance that borrows the leathery head notes from the world of masculine fragrance, and combines them with Caron's inimitable floral bouquet...

Accords: Leather, Iris, Cedar...

So I try to imagine these women with rouged cheeks and knees and their short hair in pin curls and waves, with bright lipstick and loud talking, hiding bootlegged hooch in flasks inside the garters of their hosiery, driving cars and giving their properly raised mothers fainting fits, in a sort of post-first-wave feminist version of "shock and awe" warfare. But when I smell Tabac Blond, I don't get that either.

No, I've tried Tabac Blond (the parfum version), several times now and the Texan in me cannot stop thinking about the female barrel racers at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo that I was dragged to several times a year each and *every* year until I was about ten. I may be a Left Coast liberal now, but there is a deeply ingrained Texas girl in me who loves a good rodeo, and tell you *exactly* what a livestock show and carnival smells like (hint: it's not a great mix, really), and who CANNOT be confronted by leather and not think of saddles and chaps and cowboys and cowgirls.

In my world, Tabac Blond is the smell of a well-worn saddle, worked supple by continual contact with strong sweaty hands and thighs. It's the smell of sweat from physically demanding activity, on the part of the rider and the steed, spent in the pursuit of a hard day's work. It starts out soft and quiet, but then roars to strength as it blends with the wearer's skin, warmed by what folks used to refer to as "making an honest living." It smells expensive, but in a durable way, like something of value that takes a long time to earn and therefore gets deserved care. It's not flashy or ostentatious; it's not a party. If you know country music, then let me tell you it's less about Garth Brook's "Rodeo" and more about Michael Burton's "Night Rider's Lament." (Note: This version of Night Rider's Lament is actually sung by a female vocalist who tried to adapt it for a cowgirl's perspective.) This isn't about the "roar of the Sunday crowd;" this is riding for short pay and getting nowhere and losing your share because you don't know how to live any other way. To me, even more than say, Tauer Perfumes Lonestar Memories, which feels much more high-falutin', Tabac Blond is a Louie L'Amour book, a John Wayne marathon featuring The Searchers, a quintessential longing for a open-ranged American West declared officially closed in 1890 and that was never as romantic as we like to imagine in the first place, a place of wide-open land and skies and freedom and isolation and the thrill of all of that. A place of exploration and discovery, where the understood motto was "Don't Fence Me In." In a word, Tabac Blond is iconic.

It's just not the icon Caron ever intended.

According to Angela at Now Smell This!, Luca Turin once described Tabac Blond as "dykey and angular and dark and totally unpresentable." But if you're idea of proper womanhood is a sort of classic European grand dame, then perhaps "totally unpresentable" is exactly the way I like to think of Tabac Blond. Then again, I like dirt and rodeos and cowgirls like Jodie. By Turin standards, I'm probably fairly unpresentable, too.

I should note that the parfum I'm trying is, I think, post the much lamented reformulation. I received it in 2007, and I don't think it was a vintage sample, which everyone says is better. I don't know the difference, frankly, and I love what I have, so I don't really care.

You can buy Caron Tabac Blond in 100ml EdP spray for £160(~$242) from Escentual.com (British site -- watch the shipping). You can get the pure parfum in much smaller quantities (say 7.5ml) for similar prices. You can get a sample of the pure parfum from The Perfumed Court for $7 if you just want to try it. I hear that if you buy it in quantity from the Caron Boutique in NYC the price point goes down as the quantity goes up. I, for one, will probably be saving up to buy a bottle of it eventually, just like I did with Iris Pallida. It's one of those things where the ridiculous expense is, at least for me, totally worth the experience.

"She looks like Eve Marie Saint in 'On the Waterfront'
as she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance.
Her heart's like crazy paving, upside down and back to front.
She says 'Oh, it's so hard to love
when love was your great disappointment.'"
- "Rattlesnakes," Tori Amos (You can see a video featuring the song here)

Given that it's a classic, everyone has something to say about Tabac Blond. Try...
~ A review from Perfume Shrine
~ A review from Angela at Now Smell This!
~ A review from Bois de Jasmin
~ A review from Perfume-Smellin' Things
~ A review from Pere de Pierre
~ A review from I Smell Therefore I Am
~ A review from Yesterday's Perfume
~ A review from Confessions of a Perfume Nerd
~ A review from SmellyBlog
~ A review from Scent Hive
~ A nice piece by Victoria at Suite101
~ A review from Perfume Projects

Images from Caron and The Stoecklein Collection.