Diane (Anne Dorval) wears a classic men’s fragrance by Christian Dior – Eau Sauvage. She hasn’t bought it (most of the time she’s broke), but she’s using the leftovers of a bottle her uncle gave her. If she could buy perfume, she would probably wear something overtly sexy and feminine, but the Dior perfume strangely suits her. Her son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) loves it: “You smell like fucking heaven,” he comments.
Eau Sauvage, famous for its fresh citrusy notes on a woody base, was created by Edmond Roudnitska and introduced in 1966.
When Will Graham (William Petersen) visits Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) in prison, the doctor doesn’t miss out on commenting on his perfume. Thanks to his exceptional sense of smell, he knows Will is wearing the “atrocious aftershave” he wore in court three years before, something which “has a ship on the bottle”, that is Old Spice.
Soon after commenting on the aftershave, Hannibal moves the conversation on a more personal level. Will is the one who caught Lecktor: despite appearances, they’re “just alike”, which excites Hannibal and scares Will. The doctor goes on: “You came here to look at me, to get the old scent back again”, referring to the thrill of being able to enter someone’s mind and think like him/her, something that Will does, being an empath.
When Will leaves the cell in a hurry, Hannibal is disappointed: his remark (“Smell yourself”) is spiteful but also refers to Will’s power. To get “the old scent back again”, he just has to smell himself, to look inside of himself.
This is one of the most famous scenes from the Jonathan Demme film – the first time in which Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) meet. His reaction to her presence is eerie: there’s a thick perspex surface separating them, but he is able to detect, through the holes in the perspex, what she smells like. He smells “Evyan skin cream”; he also realizes she sometimes wears Nina Ricci L’air du temps, “but not today”.
Let’s focus on the first product – a body lotion – for a moment: by “Evyan” I believe Dr. Lecter is referring to the American brand’s most famous perfume, White Shoulders. Originally launched in 1945, it is a triumph of white flowers: it includes notes of gardenia, jasmine, lily of the valley, orange flower and tuberose.
The second reference is pretty clear: Clarice sometimes wears the iconic perfume by Nina Ricci, created by Francis Fabron and released in 1948, a symbol of innocence (see the beautiful doves on the stopper). Among its middle notes, we can find jasmine and gardenia, so can we assume Clarice loves white floral perfumes?
Jean DesprezBal à Versailles is mentioned in a conversation between Harry Ross (Paul Newman) and the actress Catherine Ames (Susan Sarandon). He’s a private detective who’s investigating on the mysterious disappearance of Catherine’s ex husband. He knows she was at a murder scene by her scent, which happens to be the famous fragrance launched in 1962.
In Scent and SubversionBarbara Herman describes it as “the perfume version of a rock star’s retro suit: an interpretation of the past through the tripped-out psychedelic fantasies of the ’60s.” She continues: “It starts off brightly and moves into powdery sweetness. You can almost smell the smoke from dying-out beeswax candles. An hour or two into it, and Bal à Versailles is a mellow, powdery-gentle, and comforting skin scent.” According to Fragrantica, it has a citrusy/floral opening (rosemary, orange blossom, mandarin orange, cassia, jasmine, neroli, bergamot, Bulgarian rose and lemon), warm middle notes (sandalwood, patchouli, lilac, orris root, vetiver, ylang-ylang, lily-of-the-valley and leather) and woody/animalic base notes (tolu balsam, amber, musk, benzoin, civet, vanilla, cedar and resins). Not a perfume for the faint of heart!
A curiosity: no wonder that such a peculiar perfume has lots of fans. Among them, the Italian actress Valentina Cortese and Michael Jackson, who was said to have first used it thanks to Elizabeth Taylor.
Nick Callan (Len Cariou) gives Ginny Newley (Bess Armstrong) Guerlain Shalimar as a gift. The zigzag box tells me he gave her the Eau de Toilette version from the 1980s or the Eau de Cologne.
They have been having an affair for 26 years, but George (Alan Alda) still can’t remember the name of Doris’s (Ellen Burstyn) favourite perfume. They have cheated on their partners to stay together, so it’s ironic that her perfume is Lanvin My Sin.
When Comandante Carotenuto (Vittorio De Sica) first meets Donna Sofia “‘a Smargiassa” (Sofia Loren), he comments on her perfume. “What a wonderful perfume! Notti d’oriente?”, he muses. “No, no. Lavanda Cannavale,” she replies.
There’s a contrast between the two fragrances: Notti d’oriente is a fictional perfume, a synonym for respectability, despite its exotic and seductive name; on the other hand, Lavanda Cannavale is a real perfume which stands for something common, not refined. Later in the story, Carotenuto will ask Donna Violante (Lea Padovani) the same question; it will come out that she is the one wearing Notti d’oriente.
Lalage is the fictional perfume used by Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon). Oliver Reed’s description of it (“It’s like something warm and living”) is intriguing.
What perfume do you think could be described in the same way?
There’s a urban legend according to which Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) mentioned Caron Narcisse Noir in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, thus scoring the first major product placement in cinema. You find this piece of news everywhere on Internet, basically in every single review of the perfume. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but this is what I said, nothing more than a urban legend.
Yesterday evening I took the time to watch the film for the nth time and there is no mention [1] to the Caron perfume. The only moment in which Joe Gillis (William Holden) comments on Norma’s perfume is from the movie-watching scene. “She’d sit very close to me, and she’s smell of tuberoses, which is not my favourite perfume, not by a long shot.” According to Fragrantica, tuberose can’t even be found in the olfactory pyramid of Narcisse Noir! Maybe the legend started from the fact that Swanson was said to have used this perfume on set, but there’s a big difference between saying she used it on set and saying it was mentioned in the film. I can’t rule out the possibility that a bottle of it was on the busy dressing table of the diva, but I couldn’t find it. Show me a screencap and we’ll discuss about it.
[Post updated in July 2020] Six years have passed since I first posted about this mystery and now I can finally say it’s been almost solved. Thanks to the invaluable information provided by M, a reader of this blog, we can trace back the false rumour of Gloria Swanson mentioning Caron Narcisse Noir in Sunset Boulevard to a fact.
M found a 1927 issue of the magazine Photoplay whereWhat the Pictures Do to Us by Terry Ramsaye points out a shopping mania sparked by Sam Wood’s Beyond the Rocks (1922), a silent film starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. The article states that “a peculiarly shaped bottle, squat and widespread, with a curious and imposing big black stopper, ornamented with flower carvings” can be seen in one scene where Theodora (Swanson) is making up. The perfume (identified as the 1911 Caron creation) intrigued the women in the audience so much that it soon sold out in shops.
This information is incredibly exciting, because it would indicate the first placement of a perfume in cinema history. I knew it was too good to be true, though: I watched the film twice and the scene mentioned in the article is nowhere to be found. Maybe the version available on YouTube is not the original one, maybe some scenes are missing; in any case, *that* scene is missing. But it’s not over: there’s a scene where a narcissus perfume actually makes its appearance!
The scene is set at a chalet in the Alps, where Theodora and her middle-aged husband Josiah Brown (Robert Bolder) are spending their honeymoon. A waitress pours some narcissus perfume on a handkerchief and gives it to Theodora. Soon after the woman loses the handkerchief, which falls to the ground; it’s picked up by a waiter, who goes around the tables to find its owner. The handkerchief gets into the hands of Lord Hector Bracondale (Rudolph Valentino), who sensuosly smells it. Even if the two protagonists first met years before, this moment sets their romance in motion.
You can see that the bottle is not Caron Narcisse Noir [2], but it’s a narcissus perfume nonetheless. This makes things complicated. What is the truth? Did the film have a scene not included in the version I watched where the Caron perfume was actually visible? Or did the fans of the film just go to the stores asking for a narcissus perfume and the Caron one was the only one with that name? This uncertainty breaks me but at least now it’s clear why Gloria Swanson was so strongly associated to a narcissus perfume. This association has kept going up to this day if so many people still think Narcisse Noir is mentioned or seen in Sunset Boulevard (it’s not!), a film Swanson starred in 28 years after Beyond the Rocks.
[2] This is not the bottle of Narcisse Noir but it’s probably more exciting than that.
Even if the prop masters stuck a generic narcissus label on it, the bottle was the magnificent flacon tortue by Guerlain! The turtle-shaped bottle was created by Baccarat in 1914 to celebrate the opening of the Guerlain boutique at 68 Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Thanks to concepteaux for identifying the flacon tortue, thus adding another layer of complexity to an already complex – yet fascinating – topic.
“Go get the blow-dryer. And the Kouros. It’s in the bathroom cabinet with the sheets.”
There’s a mystery surrounding the men’s cologne mentioned in Roman Polanski’s Carnage. “Kouros” should refer to the Yves Saint Laurent aromatic fougere fragrance created by Pierre Bourdon and launched in 1981, but the bottle seen in the film is different. Moreover, later in the movie the cologne is referred to with a different name (“That smell of Kronos is killing me!”, says Penelope), and this adds more mystery to the matter.
[Post updated in May 2015] Now I can finally say the mystery has been solved. Thanks to the invaluable help of Claire, a reader of this blog, we can give an identity to the bottle: it was created by Ateliers Dinand for the film. The Parisian design studio, which has created some of the most famous perfume bottles (including Vera Wang Princess, Dolce & Gabbana, several Mona Di Orio perfumes and the new version of Yves Saint Laurent Opium), came up with a sleek bottle and a box whose pattern reminds me of Andrè Courréges logo.
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Diane (Anne Dorval) wears a classic men’s fragrance by Christian Dior – Eau Sauvage. She hasn’t bought it (most of the time she’s broke), but she’s using the leftovers of a bottle her uncle gave her. If she could buy perfume, she would probably wear something overtly sexy and feminine, but the Dior perfume strangely suits her. Her son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) loves it: “You smell like fucking heaven,” he comments. 
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