Courtesy Coty
Madonna at the New York launch of her new fragrance
Madonna is accustomed to causing a stink, but this season she’s doing it with actual perfume instead of gyrations and strategically positioned crucifixes and other emotionally loaded cultural symbols. (Although the iconoclast is still doing that, too — just ask Tel Aviv concertgoers.)
In an interview about her new perfume, Truth or Dare, Madonna told Women’s Wear Daily that she wanted to recreate the heady scent she remembers her late mother wearing. The intoxicating and mysterious stuff of her memories was French couturier Robert Piguet’s groundbreaking 1948 scent, Fracas. It’s a symphonic tuberose gardenia, typical of bygone film noir femmes fatales. Reading about the process recalls the musings of Fred MacMurray’s hapless Walter Neff, in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity: “It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”
Senior Givaudan perfumer Stephen Nilsen, a Stanford chemical engineering PhD, is the man responsible for translating Madonna’s memories of her mother into her first scent (he has also created perfumes for Tom Ford, Bath & Body Works and BCBG). I sat down with Nilsen last month to discuss the year-long process, and the challenge of distilling a sense memory which may or may not be accurate and may change over time.
“People don’t always shave the best language for interpreting their memory, the history of that memory and then their feeling of that memory and then translating that into scent,” he explained. “So it’s really about what I always say — that the most important organ for the perfumer is the ear. Listening. Hearing what people are saying and smelling with them. Sometimes you can show them different things and they say it’s exactly it, and not it.”
Madonna doesn’t suffer fools, I suggested. “That’s very true,” chuckled the soft-spoken American, clearly prepared for the sort of cross-examination that his previous collaborations with Hilary Duff or Vera Wang never elicited. “You never know how [a perfume brief] is going to end up and it’s a bit of a scary ride when you’re in it,” he admitted, “but then when she started to be able to pick out notes — like moss, for example — I knew I could trust her. It was like she trained at Grasse!”
It being Madonna, there are themes of opposition and contradiction (her whole virgin/whore thing, albeit not as explicitly as in lyrics or a music video). “She talks about sin is my twin, and all that,” Nilsen recalled, “and she talked about this duality throughout the project.”The perfume, out since early May, has not been an easy sell — like the artist’s work, it’s polarizing. It’s also not a junior fragrance, meaning it doesn’t pander to the prevailing taste for spun sugar pastries, canned peaches and butterscotch sundaes so typical of celebrity scents. There’s an eloquence to it.
Some of that duality is that although Madonna is provocative and edgy, the first smell of the perfume seems old-world, almost — dare I suggest? — traditional. “It definitely is,” Nilsen agreed. “I think it’s part of the duality of the fragrance. We always say that that the Truth part is almost this truth of the history of perfumery, this return to the floral notes that really remind her of her mother.” That aspect had to be key.
The process included Nilsen tinkering and composing more than 200 iterations (“she didn’t see all of those, obviously!”) for Madonna to smell and wear. All the while, Madonna was also working on W.E., her period film about the romance of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “I do think that there is a definite construction of this fragrance that mimics the history and the opulence of beautiful perfumes,” Nilsen said, “and the big white florals of the 1930s.” They then paired that with a gourmand “that is very modern — without being Angel!” he laughed. “One of the great things is that it is its own fragrance — I don’t think there is anything out there that is constructed like this.”
“White floral comes in and out of fashion,” Nilsen said, adding that he’s found people who say they don’t typically like white florals coming to it, because it brings a modernity to the fragrance. “Sometimes white florals can be very daring, very bold,” he added. “For somebody like Madonna they’re actually maybe a perfect note — they’re not shy. They really are something that has a statement.”
Designed by Fabien Baron (the art director who created the memorable CK One and L’Eau d’Issey bottle), the Truth or Dare bottle recalls a vintage cologne flask, but was in fact inspired by the shape and beading detail of a small silver box Madonna used to store Nilsen’s early evaluation samples. “It really helped me understand the fact that she had a real artistic vision for the whole fragrance,” Nilsen said.
The resulting juice is equal parts lady and tramp — it’s boldly feminine with lily and jasmine but thanks to strategically paired notes like musk, it’s also a little dirty. What lingers, after the drydown, is not unlike the effect of a classic perfume emerging from a sticky nightclub at dawn. “That’s the dichotomy of what musk can be — it can be sensual, it can be clean, it finds that duality depending on what you put it with,” Nilsen explained.
In his traveling bag of tricks, Nilsen had vials that isolated different accords of the perfume, including its so-called addictive piece, a term that comes up a lot in perfumery these days. “It’s a note that you smell and you want to smell more of,” Nilsen explained. “It’s intriguing, it’s a little yummy — it’s got some of that little element that makes your stomach growl a bit. Like an appetite aspect.” That trigger can be anything but typically, it’s a sweet foodie note — in Truth or Dare’s case, it’s caramelized amber (so there is a spoonful of crowd-pleasing butterscotch sundae, after all), with vanilla absolute.
Couple with the musk, it enabled the perfume to linger, Nilsen says, because Madonna wanted it to last in turn, “enough that someone else would have a memory of it.”
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