Dianne Brill — fashion icon-cum-queen of 80’s New York nightlife — has created a makeup collection and, now, a fragrance. Perhaps the best way to describe the surprisingly good Dianne Brill Eau de Parfum, which launches this month, is to let Ms. Brill do the job herself:
“I knew [perfumer] Valérie [Garnuch] because we’d done the scents for all the makeup and skincare products together. I’d saved a piece of leather I’d bought in a flea market on 26th and Sixth. I loved the smell. I kept it in a box for years. I also had a Kiehl’s body oil whose smell I loved, a sort of naughty/beachy/salty scent. They no longer make it. I had Valerie deconstruct it, and we finally found the [scent] material in it I loved. I love wood, construction sites. I didn’t want sandalwood, nothing Indian or exotic. I wanted it butch — but feminine. How do you do that? I love the smell of sticky figs that have been sitting out in the sun and became gooey, but we also did a green fig thing. I gave Valerie a cigar box whose smell I loved — I’m pretty sure it was from Cuba. I’d bought it somewhere weird, I think the Strand on Broadway. My mother was born in England but raised in Cuba and left on Castro’s arrival. You have the past always with you.
“I love the smell of old books, the paper, the history. In Germany I found all these great cigar stores geared for an elaborate, elegant, masculine experience. We have woods, fruits, flowers, spices, although the spices were a real tough call for me. My husband and family had just bought a wonderful sailboat, and we were off the coast of Mustique, and we found the producer of an excellent West Indies nutmeg, which has a very weird, disco-nasty smell, people just starting to sweat on the dance floor. So [Valerie] put that in.”
The result is a perfume that gives edgy, but an edginess polished with a gourmand brush. It is pretty polyvalent, actually. This is not in any way Chanel No 22, but neither is it Odeur 53; neither NYPL fund-raiser crystal champagne flute nor Iron Maiden beer mug, which is why it would bring a nice little hint of 3 a.m. from whatever the latest East Village club is — a sweet, sweaty, tobacco-tinged, leather-pants sex-plus-drugs — to your Row F seat just before the curtain at the Vivian Beaumont. It won’t be for everyone, and there is a very faint but unnerving trace of the scent — more the tingle, really — of that club’s dry ice and amyl nitrate-impregnated air, but that, I assume, is by design.
According to Garnuch, Brill was in the lab throughout, actually put her nose to the raw materials and smelled each step. If so, excellent. Garnuch built the juice with several interesting materials: Madagascar ylang absolute to give flower, balsamic Peruvian benzoin (“very vanillic and sweet,” says Garnuch, “myrrh is more turpenic,” i.e. turpentine), a chocolate angle (which Garnuch made with vanillin and pyrazines), synthetic stémone for the fig, synthetic damascones plus coumarine for the tobacco. In the end, of course, it is the point where they all touch that counts. That point makes me think of Hermès’s Ambre Narguilé on nitrous oxide. In any case, it is something to experience.
(Three stars; Good juice) | $96 for 50 ml; available for pre-order at Beauty Habit
Read previous Scent Notes columns.