The first time I smelled Byredo’s Gypsy Water, it was on a supermodel friend. The minimalist Scandinavian fragrance brand wasn’t yet sold in the States—this was 2007—and she had picked up a few bottles of the perfume in Paris, one of which she generously gifted me after the umpteenth time I’d begged to borrow hers. I felt so special wearing Gypsy Water; I loved the way it made me smell, like a bergamot-and-vanilla incense stick, and every spritz was like a secret my friend and I shared. “Oh, you can only get it from Colette,” I’d say smugly when someone complimented me as I wafted by. “Maybe you can pick it up the next time you’re in Paris.…” Then Byredo launched at Barneys. Gypsy Water became a best seller—and I stopped wearing it.
Memories of this brief olfactory love affair came flooding back recently, when Mur, a performance artist who creates what can best be described as “commentary songs’’ for social media, posted a video of himself dressed as a bottle of Le Labo’s Santal 33, wherein he takes dead aim at the fragrance’s cult bona fides. Everywhere I go downtown or in Brooklyn, it burns in my nose, he intones in the clip, which, as I write this, has racked up more than 120,000 views on his Instagram feed, and generated seemingly countless hot takes from the Twitter commentariat. The song is funny because it’s true; if you are part of a certain haute bohemian demographic, you know exactly what Mur is talking about. Launched in 2010, the sandalwoodsy Santal 33 propelled Le Labo from “slow perfumery” to those in-the-know to beauty-counter mainstay worth at least $20 million to Estée Lauder, which acquired the brand in 2014. It is omnipresent at hipsterish boutique hotels and concept stores that stock both Sally Rooney’s Normal People and a broad selection of clogs. It’s the kind of scent you purchase when “you have taste but you’re not sure what to buy,” reports Elizabeth Renstrom, a senior photo editor at The New Yorker who sidelines as a fragrance blogger. In other words, it isn’t a fragrance so much as a form of social capital. But what happens when that currency becomes a cliché?
Consider my experience with Gypsy Water. I didn’t stop liking its smell—I still like it. What changed was how I felt when I wore it. With popularity, Gypsy Water lost its claim on what seminal French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “distinction,” i.e., the exercise of taste that sets you apart from the rabble. “Perfume is about more than smell; it’s about what you think a smell says about you,” explains D.S. & Durga cofounder David Moltz, who has noticed that, of late, more and more people have been asking for bespoke blends. “And that’s not because they can’t find anything on our site that they like,” adds Moltz, whose best-selling, cedar-tinged Radio Bombay and the rich, fruity-floral Debaser retain a loyal following. Rather, he says, it’s a matter of threading the distinction needle: What people want is a scent that simultaneously establishes their place within a discrete community and marks them out as unique within it. “It’s about snobbery,” Moltz states plainly. “Sin nobile: If you own what’s cool, that’s power.” When the fragrance that was empowering you gets decried as “basic” in a video, the jig is up.
Even Le Labo cofounder Fabrice Penot seems to agree. “When we have been wearing a special scent like Santal 33 for a while, having discovered it before everyone else, and then we start smelling it on other people, we feel like we have been stripped of a part of our identity,” he acknowledges. Penot isn’t throwing shade at the actual scent of Santal 33; he’s merely bemoaning the fact that the scent has been obscured by its connotations.
Maybe one day we’ll be able to breathe in Santal 33’s medley of leather and iris and sandalwood without thinking of it as “the only perfume cool kids wear with their Supreme hoodies,” as per Penot. In the meantime, inventive perfumers are pioneering the concept of fragrance boosters—specially formulated elixirs designed to slightly tweak any eau for a semi-customized experience. French beauty veteran Veronique Gabai’s Booster Eau du Jour (a citrusy blend) and Booster Eau de la Nuit (which fuses amber and musk) are meant to be layered with other perfumes; Moltz’s spin on the idea is manifested in D.S. & Durga’s new range of “enhancers,” lightweight aromas that can be worn alone or as add-ons, with the dewy Crystal Pistil joining the lineup this month. Could a spritz of Crystal Pistil reignite my love affair with Gypsy Water? To check, I fetched an old, half-full bottle out of my medicine cabinet. The enhancer worked nicely with my old Byredo standby, heightening its sweetness a touch without diminishing the incense-like quality that had drawn me to the scent in the first place. The combination gave me that pleasurable feeling you have when a song you once loved plays on the radio—you prick up your ears and smile at the memories it brings back. The aroma didn’t strike me as “basic” anymore, but as something that belonged to another time in my life. I put the bottle back and the next day reached for my current go-to scent, Louis Vuitton’s new Heures d’Absence, a peppery, robust floral riff on the very first fragrance released by the French house in 1927. I like the way it smells, and—sigh—I like its pedigree. It’s not a fragrance I would recommend for folks fleeing Santal 33. But if you, dear reader, are among the stampeding horde, allow me to suggest another new flacon: Escentric Molecules’ deliciously piney Escentric 05. Like Santal 33, it’s a welcoming, woodsy, unisex scent, very much on the dry side. Unlike Santal 33, it hasn’t been memed on YouTube. Yet.
