In part 1 we looked at the background of Complice; how it was composed at the end of Coty’s life, the bottle and the packaging – and how they relate to Coty’s other works and the designs that were fashionable at the time of its release.
Now it’s the turn of the perfume itself; what does it smell like?
Let’s take a look.
When applied to cloth, the perfume leaves an unusual stain which is pink in the centre and yellow-green near the edge. In the vial the juice is a bronze-amber colour, which appears to be due to a mixture of natural oils and colourant. The colour is in part caused by a yellow Schiff’s base, which is produced when aldehydes react with the methyl anthranylate that’s used to make orange flower.
While it smells quite natural there are synthetics too; this is a modern perfume in construction, if not in style. It was tested in Parfum concentration – which is not an Extrait, the juice is much weaker than that and performs like an Eau de Parfum. A sample vial (of slightly less than 1ml) was used for the first test, and the odour yield was not very high for that amount of juice.
Complice is a fruity-floral Oriental. But that could be misleading because this isn’t the type of fruity floral we are used to. There are few of the red fruity synthetics that are used in modern fruity-florals, and consequently, Complice has a slightly antique air, being both delicately sweet, and more and more lush as the profile coalesces around the liquid rose.
The rose is fabulous, but it’s not the star of the show. It’s now partnered with jasmine, and a thick powdery body which is offset by fresh angular notes. The opening phase is a balance of fresh and gently narcotic.
Despite the idea that the Oriental is Sexy and Mature, there is a wonderful innocence to the floral liquidity of Complice, which – when brightened by its fresh overtones – gives the sense of a cool morning before the day is warmed by the rising sun. This is clearly not an interior scene; it’s not the dry green baize of l’Emeraude, nor the languid boudoir of Shalimar – which arose from it. Complice feels innocent; it's a young woman in bud, not the spreading flower of maturity.
And even though the Oriental sillage is quite thick, the theme is light and pale with citrus-fruity-florals. It has an uplifting quality that’s very different to the serious and darkly grounded Chypres that were popular around the time it was released.
The wording of the advert reads :
Des liens se croises
Une tendre complicité
Une nouvelle intimité
Complice vous procède et vous suit
Témoin de vos contactes précieux
Paths cross
A tender complicity
A new intimacy
Complice precedes and follows you
A witness to your precious contacts
This idea of a scent being complicit in ‘new intimacies and precious contacts’ has sexual connotations which are the domain of the Oriental, a ripe and mature genre. But despite the sensuality of Complice’s Oriental, it may have been designed as a Mademoiselle Scent. Ma Griffe is often thought of as the first Teen Perfume, but Complice was composed around 1933-34, some 12 years earlier than the Carven.
With its sweet sensual and pale dreaminess, Complice could be seen as being aimed at a new, and hitherto unexploited market, women who were not mothers, wives or fiancés, but younger women who did not buy perfume. They may have been wearing Coty’s Air Spun face powder, but might not have been able to afford his more expensive perfumed products. Teenagers would not become economically significant for another twenty years, so, if it were the case that Complice was intended for teenagers and young twenty somethings, it would have been a precocious idea, well ahead of its time.
In 1934, in the belly of the depression, this was either an act of complete folly, or it was inspired genius on the part of the entrepreneur who envisioned the day when perfumes for children and even babies became a normal part of commerce; it’s unlikely that Jacques Guerlain would have entertained the idea, even less compose his own version of Petit Guerlain (1994 : Jean-Paul Guerlain).
While there is no hard evidence to back this up, the light and then creamy nature of Complice could suggest a naive innocence is being channelled, something the advertising would seem to promote - with its talk of tender complicity in new found intimacy; new found intimacies not being the done thing for married women in the 1930’s, and – as we will see, Coty was a conservative character who would have probably disapproved of such goings on.
With its aldehydic citrus, jasmin-rose & orange flower bouquet, and a powdery sweet musky white amber base, Complice can be more accurately defined as an Aldehydic Floriental. Putting the aldehydic and the oriental genres together – which seem to be opposites – is certainly a novel idea, but it’s one that is carried off with aplomb, both elements remain coherent and intact right into the base with the light overtones remaining crisp and clear.
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Coty had already done the first Amber with Ambre Antique, and he’d composed Emeraude years earlier – which became the prototype for Shalimar. So why did he return to the Oriental with Complice?
One reason could have been Jacques Guerlain. Coty and Jacques Guerlain were the two greatest perfumers of their age. And – as it happened – they were born within months of each other.
Coty was a prolific inventor of forms; Guerlain excelled in perfecting them. Guerlain’s three greatest works were all (arguably) based on Coty perfumes: l’Origan (1905) became l’Heure Bleue (1912), Chypre de Coty (1917) inspired Mitsouko (1919) and Emeraude (1921) formed the basis of Shalimar (1925). So there would have been no love lost between Coty and his great sibling-rival, who seemed to take what Coty did and polish it ‘till it shone.
When Vol de Nuit appeared in 1933, which is sometimes said to be the prototype of the Green Chypre, it would have seemed that Guerlain had stolen a march on Coty. Even if Vol de Nuit is one of Guerlain’s less coherent works, it was still something different, and possibly came as a surprise to Coty, who was ostracised by the perfume community and may not have been up to date with what was going on; and anyway, Jacques Guerlain was a very private man and may not have given much away about what he was doing. In the light of this, it’s possible to imagine that Coty reacted against Guerlain and went in the opposite direction. If Guerlain was going to do Chypre, Coty would do Oriental – and he was going to do it his way.
Complice wasn’t going to be something ordinary, and there’s a twist in the tale. The base is bananary-fruity and slightly green-aldehydic, and this is set on a sweet, and pale powdery backdrop; semi-gourmand. At different points of its long evolution it brings to mind the work of Sophia Grojsman, Anaïs Anaïs, Ivoire, and Maurice Roucel’s wonderfully seductive K de Krizia. All of which makes this slightly aldehydic white Amber Oriental look like an idea that has passed the test of time.
Assuming it was Coty who invented this gourmand-flavoured drydown, and not Jean-Pierre Weil, it would have been a first for Coty; saying to Jacques Guerlain – and the rest of them – he was not going to back down.
Even at the end of his life Coty hadn’t lost his creative spark, he was still coming up with new and surprising ideas.
Being an Aldehydic Oriental, and maybe a Gourmand to boot, Complice was a not a new genre but it was a hybrid, and another invention to add to Coty’s list: the Chypre, the Amber, the Oriental, the liquid rose of Jacqueminot, he even produced a Cologne de Toilette.
Some time around 1909, Coty released Eau de Coty, one of a trio of colognes (another innovation perhaps) and one of them was Eau de Coty Cordon Rouge, which combines a citrus head with a floral heart and a warm woody base, which gives it the depth and duration of an Eau de Toilette.
Since then, there has been a whole host of creations along these lines, ranging from Eau Neuve to Terre d’Hermès. We are not talking about a Farina style Cologne here, it’s much deeper and warmer-woodier than that. But, even though the form is so ubiquitous there is no mention of this kind of hybrid in the literature. It may seem banal to say that somebody must have invented it, but somebody did, and so far I’ve been able to find nothing like it that predates the Coty, which would suggest it was in fact Coty that invented what I call the Cologne de Toilette.
As well as creating several new genres of perfume, there are also Coty’s commercial innovations that should be taken into account when assessing his legacy as one of the founders of modern perfumery; he sold purse bottles
and he developed his business by acquiring flower fields, factories and other production facilities. This type of vertical integration is a strategy still used by large companies when they want to expand.
Coty was not just a perfumer, he was an industrialist who – with his aggressive expansion across the globe – put his perfumery on a war footing. The scale and speed at which Coty grew must have been a shock to less agile rivals who were still thinking on the artisanal scale, and working out of shop fronts in elegant parts of town.
In the end though, for Coty it became about perfume as a business, and – because his perfumes were superlative – he thought it was possible to control his perfume business with the same attention to detail he gave to his perfume formulae. Controlling such a juggernaut was a feat that no one person could carry off alone, and obsessive micro management was one of the reasons why his luxury goods empire suffered so badly during the depression of the 1930’s.
With Coty’s demise, the supply of exquisite jewel-like perfumes dried up, and all that was left of his Perfume business was the Business of perfume. It’s no coincidence that his empire, which became Coty Incorporated, is now one of the biggest perfume management companies in the world.
Complice was the last of Coty’s perfumes, and even if Coty Inc treated it in a somewhat offhand manner, it turned out to be a beautiful white floral Oriental; fine, mobile, pretty and engaging.
What’s most astonishing about it though, is the fact that Coty was still able to produce such a buoyant work of beauty when he had all but retreated into bitter reclusion.
If there were two warring sides to Coty’s character, they are exemplified by Complice.
Coty was not only a consummate perfumer-creator, he also had political ambitions, getting himself elected major of Ajaccio in Corsica (although the result was later annulled due to corruption). But Coty didn’t give up there. When his career in politics came to an end, he turned to the media as an outlet for his views. He bought the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, and set up smaller ones with a much more right wing agenda. Coty spent a great deal of time and money on newspapers like L’ami du peuple, which is described by Wikipedia.fr as xenophobic and antisemitic. As well as that he financed far right organisations like Action Française to the tune of millions of francs. He was an outspoken nationalist, as can be seen in the picture below – which asserts that reform of the state is the necessary prelude to ‘the reconstruction of order, hierarchy and discipline’.
How can a right wing firebrand like this be the man who created l’Origan, La Rose Jacqueminot and l’Emeraude?
Time and again Coty displayed what can only be called the Wagner syndrome: an odious figure who nonetheless created works of great beauty.
The word complice means accomplice, partner or associate. In French there is no distinction between the meanings ‘partnership’ and ‘partner in crime’, which as a choice of name gives it an ambiguous feel. (The choice was probably the Corporation’s and not Coty’s.) There are also the name’s flirty connotations which are aroused by the advertising copy. Add to that the fact that the perfume was a collaboration d’outre-tombe between Coty and the Corporation – and that it was a mixed genre scent packaged in a hybrid of Art Nouveau and Seventies styles, and we can see that Complice is a liminal work in many ways; in one way or another it stands apart from most other perfumes.
Conceived during one economic crisis and born into another, it partakes of both periods but belongs to neither. Instead, like Joy, Complice offers a beauty that goes beyond (or at least tries to ignore) the mundane realities of life.
Complice is a symbol of the Jekyll and Hyde character that was Coty: on the one hand he was a perfume artist of real genius, and enormously successful; on the other, he was a misanthrope and some would say would say a fascist.
It’s a hard square to circle.
François Coty
Born : 8pm on the 3rd of May 1874, Ajaccio
Died : 25th of July 1934, Louveciennes
Delicious post. I bathed in it. Thank you!