Mother's Day Perfume Search: Looking For Old Or Discontinued Perfume Lines
By Joanna McLaughlin
For reasons scientists are not entirely clear about, the olfactory sense is closely linked to memory. As performer Garth Brooks once commented, a whiff of a certain perfume and he "was right back in high school." All of us associate certain smells with times and places in our lives.

A woman of a certain age has probably had lots of different favorite over the course of her life. The world of perfume mirrors the world of fashion at times, in that certain things seem to come into and go out of fashion rather rapidly while a few, a very few, items become timeless classics.

In fragrance, there are still a few timeless scents. I like to put Chanel No. 5 in that category. First introduced in 1923, this venerable perfume is still well liked even by modern celebrities. The newest celebrity spokesperson for the line is Nicole Kidman.

Youth Dew, which came out in the 1950s, is still a classic but it tends to be regarded as more "dated." It's a rich, powerful, Oriental scent that is-as an overall style-a bit heavy for today's tastes which favor light, fruity, on-the-go kind of fragrances.

In the world of perfume, even surviving a decade can put you in the near-classic category like Tresor by Lancome (1990), Obsession and Eternity by Calvin Klein, and Happy by Clinique.

When buying perfume for Mother's Day, you can try to go for a new scent (if your mom is fashion forward or happens to like a certain new scent) or you can try to get one of her favorites.

Sometimes a favorite is off the market. A good case study for this phenomenon involves a perfume called Evening in Paris. Created by Ernst Breaux (the "nose" behind Chanel No. 5), this was a wildly popular fragrance in a zippy blue bottle available in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. Its fragrance resembles Chanel No. 5: it's a sparkling adelhyde type floral. But anyone shopping the perfume counters in the U.S. after 1990 could not have found a trace of Evening in Paris. Even if you asked for it, most sales people would not have even heard of it.

Then it came back. It's available in the most unusual of locations: The Vermont Country Store (http://www.vermontcountrystore.com). This catalog typically features country and New England items, not fine fragrance. But this particular retro-scent had a large and vocal fan base and enough requests came in that the company started to track it down. It turns out Evening

in Paris is still manufactured, but in France. They imported it and it's back.

The Vermont Country Store also offers other nostalgic fragrances including Tigress and Tweed and some Yardley products.

It gets more difficult when a retro-scent is no longer manufactured. In those cases, you can't even turn to hoarders because perfume (unlike wine) tends to decay with age.

So how do you find a retro-scent that your mom liked way-back-when? When searching for anything nowadays, your first step is the obvious one: Google the perfume name (and possibly some variations) to see if anyone has it. There are many large warehouse type perfume sites that have a little bit of everything. More obscure fragrances may be available on their own site.

Not every story has a happy ending. Some fragrances truly are gone forever. If that's the case, you can go to a perfume website or blog (check out the links at www.theperfume-reporter.com) and ask other perfume lovers.

If a scent is no longer available but people know about it, you can get a description. From that description, a knowledgeable sales clerk or perfume friend (go to the websites) can recommend similar type scents. For instance, if you know your mom's favorite scent was what they call a woody floral, you can get an updated version (Safari by Ralph Lauren comes to mind).

Remember, perfume is much more than perfume today. You can buy a wide range of scent products today including body creams, lotions, shower gels, soaps, and other products for the bath. If your mom has always worn spray-on fragrance, stick to an eau-de-parfum or cologne (the eau-de-parfum is stronger and will cost more). If your mom is getting more streamlined these days, a shower gel and fragrant lotion may fit the bill better. Dry skin does better with rich creams and lotions. For dry skin, a spray-on fragrance simply will not last very long, so the idea of combining a cream (to moisten skin) and a spray-on is quite practical.

Copyright (c) 2007 Joanna McLaughlin

Joanna McLaughlin can be read at www.theperfume-reporter.com .

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