Christmas is coming, so that means presents. And for lots of us, that means scent. Some of the hopeful donors will be the sort to wander helplessly around a fragrance department, bewildered by choice until they seize, in desperation, on the stuff that looks nicely packaged. That was the route whereby my father once bought my mother some pleasing aftershave.
Others will know exactly what they’re after: the scent their womenfolk have always liked, the perfume their own mothers used to wear. Which is dandy: some of the most beautiful and original perfumes have been with us for decades, a century even.
But it’s an illusion to think that what we’re buying is the same scent as Coco Chanel et al used to wear. What we’ve got now is a 21st-century version of the originals. Many will be perfectly good versions, just not the same. In some cases, it is a matter of adapting to changing tastes. But almost always it is because ingredients that perfumers would once have used are banned or just restricted. Banned by Brussels, what’s more (though not, as it happens, by the EU). The regulatory body for the fragrance industry, Ifra, which is based there, issues a regular checklist of material that manufacturers either can’t use or can only use in limited concentration or with radical modifications. It’s a bit like telling artists they can’t use yellow ochre or obliging them to find a substitute for ultramarine. Or as one exasperated perfumer, Serge Lutens, put it, you might as well ask bakers to make bread without flour.
Some old constituents of scent had to go. We’re squeamish these days about taking glands from the underparts of civet cats, or the by-products of sperm whales or the oily bits of beaver. And there were a couple of old ingredients that were probably downright carcinogenic. But Ifra, which resembles an olfactory version of the Health and Safety Executive, has gone further than that; it has restricted the use of some of the most commonplace ingredients in fragrance — vanilla, lemon, basil, oak moss, you name it. I went to the launch the other day of a new version of a very old and lovely perfume from Houbigant, one of the old French fragrance houses. On the table in front of us was an arrangements of flowers and fruit which featured in the scent. One of the owners of the brand, Gian Luca Perris, gestured to the lemons and said tartly: ‘You could eat all these and you’d have taken in far more citrus than the regulators would ever let you do in a scent.’
And that’s the thing. Many of the things being restricted we could actually ingest in quantity perfectly legally and without ever coming to harm. Vanilla — beloved of confectioners — is a bean you can use in cake; lemon you can eat ad lib; basil you can chop by the bunch and sprinkle over pasta. But you can’t use these things — that is, their derivatives — or hundreds of others, in the quantity or in the form you want if you’re a perfumer, just in case someone, somewhere (but probably in the US), might be allergic to them. And there are virtually no limits to the health and safety edicts, because the regulators employ scientists whose job it is to search out potential allergens and refine the regulations accordingly. As Roja Dove, a fragrance creator, says, ‘Perfumers have to turn to chemical ingredients if they can’t use natural ones. And they have neither the subtlety nor the complexity.’
In other words, it’s getting ever more difficult to produce lovely scent: the latest ingredient to fall foul of the regulators is coumarin, found in the tonka bean, which has been used since the 19th century. There are already radical restrictions on oak moss, a kind of lichen which gives a soft creaminess to scent. Helpfully, the Ifra scientists have identified the problem molecule so you can, if expense is no object, pay large sums to use specially treated oak moss which has had it removed. Problem sorted, you may say, except it makes the fragrance colossally expensive and deters cost-conscious scent-makers from using the stuff at all. Incidentally, in the Middle East, they use oak moss in bread, to no discernibly bad effect.
The problem isn’t (just) that perfumers are running scared of the regulators; it’s that their suppliers, the companies who make the bases from which they produce their fragrance, simply won’t supply them with anything that might, conceivably, fall foul of Ifra. Indeed Houbigant’s Gian Luca Perris told me that, when he’s formulating scent on a computer (yep, that’s how part of it is done), the programme won’t allow you to use banned ingredients or in greater concentrations than the regulators allow.
To do Ifra justice, it has our interests at heart. This is a research institute that was set up in the mid-1960s to regulate industries that use fragrance, and that includes household detergents as well as fine perfumes. In other words it keeps an eye on Fairy Liquid as well as Guerlain’s Mitsouko. Stephen Weller, its spokesman, says that in the last decade the extent of dermal sensitisation — or bad reactions in skin — to fragrance has fallen by a half in Europe, which can’t exactly be attributed to Ifra but shows ‘a strong correlation’ with its efforts. ‘Human safety is paramount,’ he says.
Ye-es. Except that this doesn’t seem to take the principle of proportionality into account. What, exactly, is to stop perfume houses from offering potential customers a list of the ingredients, and letting the buyer beware? Manufacturers have to itemise notorious potential allergens on the pack already. You may be unfortunate enough to be the one person on earth with an allergy to oak moss, but without wishing to be callous, that’s your problem.
There is a solution to all this. Customers can tell fragrance houses that they would prefer their classic scents to stay that way. Because unless they get shot of the regulators, the really lovely scents of the past, which rank among the genuine cultural achievements of the 20th century, will cease to exist.
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