Last week I enjoyed an unusual flirtation with clean scents. I spritzed on some of the original clean fragrance, Estee Lauder's White Linen. At the time of its release it was considered a light perfume (!) meant to project a sort of detergent, white, tight-skinned Tippi Hedren blond ice queen image but by today's standards it's so heavy that it just...couldn't possibly be thought of as smelling clean. Predictably, my favorite thing about it is the sourness of the beginning, so I kept spraying on more to get that effect. By spray six I was surrounded by a blinding white force-field of aldehydes 40 feet across and must surely have smelled strange to passersby. See, this is one of the reasons I enjoy perfume so much- subverting the intentions of the perfumer in various ways and playing jokes with it- in this case over-spraying a perfume meant to broadcast cleanliness to the point of whoreish vulgarity. Of course I'm the only one that gets these jokes and to others I must just smell unpleasantly loud and outdated, but that's their fault for not making themselves aware of the history of White Linen! What else to say about White Linen...I can honestly say that I love EVERY Estee Lauder perfume, that they're so inexpensive they practically GIVE them away, yet they're all beautiful, sophisticated, complex compositions that could command much higher prices. They have staying power on skin far beyond anything else so accessible or cheap, probably because most of them were created for a different era when women weren't as afraid of smelling "overpowering" as they are now. They don't discontinue any of their perfumes, which is brave and commendable because they probably lose money for it; they know that each of those scents has a devoted following of women that have been wearing them for decades. I mean, just IMAGINE what the typical idiot girl browsing the Macy's counter looking for a tutti-frutti syrupy floral would think of Azuree or Spellbound or Alliage if they sniffed the testers: "EWW this smells so OLD and it's so STRONG I don't wanna smell OLD or STRONG and oh my god it smells MUSTY is that PATCHOULI this smells MASCULINE, GROSS! TOTALLY OLD LADY IN AN ELEVATOR! EWW WHO WOULD BUY THIS?" Imagining it just delights me to no end. That all of these gorgeous compositions completely not in keeping with the current tastes of the masses are still faithfully produced and displayed and sold at absurdly low prices with virtually no reformulations over the years is just incredible. I love you, Estee Lauder! And look, here's loathsome Gwyneth, looking smugger than ever, shilling the flanker Pure White Linen to Japanese people! I kind of like the well-bred, WASP-y mood of this commercial- it's all those D&G Light Blue ads minus the white speedo-ed Guido and sleaze factor.
