Frédéric Malle Une Fleur de Cassie

I apologise to all those who have been faithfully checking in these last weeks: I had very limited internet access in France, and have busy working on another, deadlined writing project since I returned to Canada a week ago. After purchasing Bigarade Concentrée on the trip, I realized I had written very little about one of perfume houses I admire the most, Frédéric Malle's Editions de Parfums, and so I vow to rectify the situation over the next week with reviews on some FM favourites.

But first, my nemesis, Une Fleur de Cassie. About two years ago, after trying Caron's Farnesiana, I was under the impression that I enjoyed cassie flower or acacia farnesiana, a type of mimosa. Une Fleur de Cassie was therefore one of the Frédéric Malle scents I was most eager to try when I first sampled the line at the Los Angeles branch of Barney's in August 2005. Created by Dominique Ropion, who also did Vétiver Extraordinaire and Carnal Flower for the line, Une Fleur de Cassie contains bergamot, apricot, cassie, mimosa, rose, violet, jasmin, carnation, clove, cumin, aldheydes, salicylate, musk, vanilla, cedar and sandalwood. This list of notes in no way conveys the surpassing weirdness of the perfume.

When Une Fleur de Cassie is first sprayed - on to skin or paper, or into the air of Malle's pointless, television sci-fi smelling booths - everything is normal for the first 40 seconds or so: there is the bright, powdery, soapy smell of bergamot with a touch of fruity sweetness. Very quickly, however, a profoundly strange note begins to take shape, increasing in intensity as the seconds pass. Half gamey wildness, half "floral" cleaning solvent, the smell is aggressive, elegant and almost alien in its aloofness. It is floral in the way of one of those stinking, carnivorous plants at the zoo, feline in the way of the surreal big cat from Chez Jane, one of those hilariously confounding poems by Frank O'Hara (a favourite writer of mine) : "The white chocolate jar full of petals / swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye... / The tiger, / marvellously striped and iritable, leaps / on the table and without disturbing a hair / of the flowers' breathless attention, pisses / into the pot, right down its delicate spout." Some reviewers have compared the smell to that of a papermill and certainly it has the pervasive, flat and yet peppery quality to it that such factories do, though it lacks that sulfurous, farty wind that comes off wet wood pulp. Une Fleur de Cassie smells as I imagine a tannery or furrier might. There is a sprinkling of chalk dust, a little warm and woody violet... but mostly that smell.

One of the many things I love about Frédéric Malle is the website: the product photos and descriptions provided are clear and helpful, the perfumer bios heartening, and their scent-choosing questionnaire pioneered the interactive approach taken up by other fragrance companies (their prompt replies and generous sample send-outs still make them the leaders here, too). One of the fascinating things I've noticed is that the website assigns a colour to each scent and the colours I prefer seem to mark the fragrances I love best - the sunny mango of Le Parfum de Thérèse, the grey-green of Bigarade Concentrée, the warm raspberry of Une Rose. The colour representing Une Fleur de Cassie is what we call around this house "baby-poo yellow". This is a remarkably appropriate colour - anybody who has changed the diaper of a breastfed baby knows that there is a rich, fatty smell to their poop which is bizarrely close to that of hot, buttered popcorn, and there is a hint of this scent in the heart of Ropion's perfume.

Indeed, despite its elegance, there is a circus air to Une Fleur de Cassie - a leathery, furry, urinous fug mixing with the smell of roasting nuts, popcorn and powdered sugar. In my opinion, it conjures the circus better than Dzing!, a subtler, warmer fragrance that sometimes feels to me like a dry run for another Giacobetti/L'Artisan creation, Tea for Two. It is interesting that some testers report that Une Fleur de Cassie smells of cardboard to them, as Dzing! is famous for that warm note. The Malle scent, however, has none of the sheer, cheerful wearability of a L'Artisan fragrance: in the words of the Malle website, it is "voluptuous", "disturbing", "bestial" and "verging on coarse". I find it utterly unwearable and yet oddly compelling. Please comment if you've tried the body butter (Beurre Exquise).