La Rose Jacqueminot: Coty's First Perfume

My first sniff of “La Rose Jacqueminot” was from a sample vial. Few perfumes have surprised me as much as this one did. It smelled so modern. I had been expecting, oh, something ghastly-sweet, old-fashioned and of its time. This, instead, smelled timeless.

La Rose Jacqueminot was the perfume that the young Francois Coty threw his famous tantrum over, after an unsuccessful attempt to sell it to the Parisian department store Le Grands Magasins du Louvre. He smashed the bottle on the floor, drawing a crowd of women demanding some for themselves. (By some accounts, there may have been some hired frenzy-starters in the crowd.) In this unlikely but imaginative way, the Coty company was launched.

Nice story. I’m more inclined to believe it now than I used to be.

The bottle I have looks like it’s from the early Eighties. There’s a bar code on the bottom flap of the box, which is made of soft paperboard with slightly embossed printing. The “Div. Of Pfizer” sticker on the bottom means it was manufactured sometime between 1963 and 1992. 


Obviously, this is a rose fragrance, and there are violets, and maybe a bit of carnation; hints of green and spice and, definitely, some civet in the base. I don’t smell any “old aldehydes” here, either, but the bottle came from Alaska, so perhaps wasn’t exposed to much heat. The scent, though, is less about “notes” than about a feeling, a gestalt.

When I received this last week and immediately applied some, at first I thought I’d been duped. It seemed too subtle for an eau de parfum, and I wondered if the seller had diluted it. I was busy, though, and went on with my to-do’s. A short while later, I became aware of the most wonderful floral haze surrounding me. I felt like I was walking inside a rose-scented cloud. The perfume had bloomed, and now it was flowing all around me.

I’ve tried so many perfumes, hundreds and hundreds, some with no sillage, some with way too much, but this particular effect was new to me. I thought of two other perfumes I’ve sampled, YSL’s (vintage) Paris and Rosine’s La Rose, both of which are rose/violet powerhouses. I’ve smelled ionone, the synthetic violet aromachemical, from my perfume notes kit, and violet soliflores, and rose attars, soliflores and absolutes, and all kinds of rose-based perfumes, and there are not many I like this well.

How this stealth blooming quality was achieved, I have no idea. There is little information available on this scent. My bottle is probably between 25 and 30 years old. The rise-up-and-envelop action happens whether the scent is dabbed or sprayed. And it lasts, for hours.

This won’t be one of those the-past-was-better laments, because there are lots of great rose-based perfumes out there, vintage and modern -- (most of) the Les Parfums de Rosine line, many niche specialties featuring rose and vintage treasures like L’Arte de Gucci. I was merely curious about this one, until I smelled it. And realized that it could be more than a relic. Back and forth I vacillated, the usual fleabay dilemma, but when a fairly reasonable bottle showed up, I grabbed it. Now I feel like I own a piece of history. Best of all, it’s a wearable one!

Do you have a favorite rose perfume? What is it? Leave a comment by midnight, Monday, Dec. 6^th, U.S. Eastern Standard Time. I’ll do a drawing and send the winner a sample of La Rose Jacqueminot. 

The painting, by John Singer Sargent, was done in 1904, the year La Rose Jacqueminot was (by most accounts) released. Titled “Lady Speyer,” the portrait’s subject was Eleanora Speyer, daughter of a Prussian noble who fought in the Civil War. She shared superficialities with most of Sargent’s wealthy clients, but was very accomplished on her own. She was a virtuoso professional violinist and a Pulitizer Prize-winning poet who only began writing after her children were born. 

La Rose Jacqueminot shows up occasionally on auction sites. The prices vary, but it’s generally $2 to $3/ml, sometimes more. Some sample and decant sellers on the perfume forums have it, too.

Thanks to the website "Cleopatra's Boudoir" for providing information about the scent and its history.

Chypre by Coty

I have been fortunate enough to obtain some vintage Chypre de Coty.

Smelling this perfume has sent me into a frenzy of research and imaginings. There is so much to think about! There’s Paris in 1917, the center of the cultural and intellectual world, giving birth to the modern in its bars, studios, presses and garrets. There’s WWI itself, the most horrible of all wars, still going on, but beginning to turn. There’s Francois Coty himself, born ordinary in Corsica, who founded a worldwide business.

There is a lot of legend surrounding Chypre. Coty’s home, Corsica, has a Mediterranean climate similar to that of Cyprus. In 2004, archaeologists discovered a perfume factory there, of industrial magnitude, four thousand years old. Resins similar to the ones that make up the chypre family of perfumes were found, still in small amorphae, on the site. Reportedly, a perfume of the chypre type was made for Catherine the Great of Russia, around 1880. In fact, there may have been as many as nine previous chypre-based perfumes before Coty released his, in 1917 Paris, a year of bitter cold, epidemics, bombings, shortages, the Bolshevik revolution, and, incidentally, the execution for treason of the infamous dancer/courtesan/spy Mata Hari (pictured).

While it would be tempting to believe that Coty, generally credited with this first modernist scent, was a perfumer/artist hanging out in the cafes with Apollinaire, Picasso and Cocteau, he was in fact a businessman. He started by selling flower-based essences to Paris barbers, took training at Grasse, and started his company with a small loan from his grandfather. He didn’t have much luck at first. Then, a bottle of one of his earlier perfumes broke after falling from a store shelf, filling the store with its scent, and soon sold out. Did he drop the bottle on the floor to demonstrate the appeal of his new product, as is sometimes reported? Probably not. In all likelihood, it was an accident.

But Coty had a good, if not utterly new, idea. If he was to combine the labdanum resin of Cyprus with the inedible but oddly floral Mediterranean fruit, bergamot, and then add the fungus oak moss to the rose/jasmine florals that had been perfuming French boudoirs and bosoms for centuries -- and then add some other stuff (possibly lemon, storax; the formulas vary) -- he could bottle it simply but beautifully, and sell it for a reasonable price.

Luca Turin has called Chypre “an abstract idea,” and it was, in the sense of re-creating a place-memory through scent-memory. Cyprus is full of rocks, dry dirt and the unrelenting heat that produces rich, aromatic resins in the plants hardy enough to survive there. Oak moss, a parasitic fungus, absorbs the strength of the massive tree, and has been known as a fixative for centuries.

Modernism in general was all about leaving behind the tidy Victorian positivism and sense of the inevitability of progress, and replacing it with the blunt and brutal “life force,” which would then force vitality in all forms of expression. Given the carnage and nihilism of WWI, that seems inevitable. And Chypre was not Victorian in any way. Concurrent and complimentary to the burgeoning cultural upheaval all around, it was a powerhouse perfume designed to be worn by modern women. (The writer Dorothy Parker was reported to have trailed clouds of it wherever she went.)

Although Coty Chypre is discontinued now, the classification “chypre” lives on in the name of a perfume family, based on that same oak moss/labdanum/bergamot trinity that has been disparaged in recent years as an “old-lady” scent. Puh-leeez! Kids, there is nothing old-lady about it.

There’s talk that the chypres will return to general popularity, now that the smell-like-nothing fragrances of the 90’s and the Barbielike fruity/florals of recent years are fading.

Unfortunately, they will never be quite the same, but neither will we.

My sample of Coty’s Chypre is from the seventies. There had been some reformulation, but the oak moss base was still intact at that time.

Chypre by Coty (discontinued): Lists of the notes vary, but included are oak moss, labdanum, bergamot, rose, jasmine, and possibly lemon, neroli, orange, storax and patchouli.

Chypre by Coty turns up occasionally on Ebay. Other good examples of the chypre type are Miss Dior, Bandit, Cabochard, Givenchy III, Mitsouko and Jolie Madame. As with all older perfumes, the vintage versions feature the aromatic chypre base, which has been much degraded in recent years by EU regulations (oak moss gave somebody a rash once) and corporate cost-control measures.