Civet -- a rich cream taken from the anal gland of the civet cat and used as a raw material in traditional French perfumery -- poses a question for perfume criticism: How, in the 21st century, do you judge a piece of scent art that was created for an earlier time? Which is to ask, What is a five-star perfume?
Use civet or a synthetic facsimile up front, and you get Yves Saint Laurent’s Kouros. This men’s fragrance was created by the perfumer Pierre Bourdon in 1981, but for anyone outside of France, it might as well be 1881, when the scent would have been perfectly in sync. The experts agree that Kouros is an excellent juice qua juice: as strong and clear as a Roberto Alagna B flat, persistent on skin, as structured as an ocean liner. “C’est un grand parfum!” a French perfumer told me. It’s a great perfume! The problem is that this strength, clarity, persistence and depth are applied to the hot, ripe smell of a French trucker’s Jockey shorts after a muggy day on the A51. Which illustrates the difference between being great and being wearable. This perfume is fecal. Technical excellence must count: thus two stars, for solid construction. But an era’s aesthetic must count as well, and despite its molecular wizardry, Kouros is as wearable in the 21st century as 19th-century spats.
Which is not to say that there are no new ways of creating from this ancient material new machines. The perfumer Maurice Roucel, under the direction of Frédéric Malle, proposes one in Musc Ravageur. Roucel burns that hot, ripe smell in the engine block up front,
fueling Ravageur with a little synthetic civet, a lot of synthetic castoreum (un castor is a beaver) and a synthetic musk base. He carefully calibrates the mix against natural vanillin, cinnamon, bergamot and orange and, somehow, produces a perfume that smells animalic yet crystalline, white and pure. It is druglike. Musc Ravageur is not just wearable; it is viscerally compulsive. If you recall the instant in which you inhaled, in a brush of rare and unintended proximity, the body odor of a beautiful stranger, you’ve experienced the effect of this perfume.
Civet can also act as a support for another material. In the case of Rose Poivrée (introduced in 2000), that would be rose absolute, never a lovely scent and certainly not by today’s standards. It is weighty, dark and strong, like a wave that lands you flat on your back. But if made well and of good quality, it can be emphatically beautiful. Here, Jean-Claude Ellena uses civet to amend rose absolute, and the overall effect is akin to breathing in the warm, slightly fetid breath of some immense, fur-covered animal. It is that moment in an Indian spice market when a surge of sweltering, humid air, as if from the lungs of some morose god, drowns you in spice and car exhaust. But if you have the skin for it, this perfume is mesmerizing, even today.
