Gourmands are, for lack of a better word, difficult. The "foody" exercise can be taken to such extremes that there are few companies capable of reining things in. It seems there is no limit to how obscenely a scent can mimic fruit, candy, sugar. Step into any Bath and Body Works, and you're immediately assaulted by the full range of gourmandom, with berries, caramels, vanillas, even whole pies (apple is especially popular) splashing you in the face with their cavity-inducing charms. I'm convinced that today's teenage girl would be lost without a wardrobe that makes her smell like a walking See's.
What started it all? I can't be bothered to find out. I do know that Thierry Mugler is largely to blame. Angel was one of the game-changing '90s perfumes that set all the dusty chypres and orientals aside to make room for sweetness, and lots of it. In 1991, just one year before Angel's release, the market was crowded with losing bids for the future of perfumery. Things like Lauder's Spellbound and Cardin's Choc weren't exactly inspiring, or inspired. Dior's Dune was popular, but oddball, its transcendence something only time could qualify. Instant breakthroughs were all but nonexistent.
Then came Mugler and Angel, his sugar bomb. Sweetness, quite suddenly, became all the vogue. I've smelled it on many people, but they've mostly been adult women well beyond their teenage years. I attribute this to the distinct tremor of patchouli that radiates from its saccharine core. In fact, for its first five minutes on skin, the patchouli pushes past the other fuzzier notes and makes its presence very well known. Eventually the sweet notes take over with honey, pink berry, vanilla, and white chocolate sweeping the earthiness aside, the olfactory equivalent of the dessert table in a Viennese hotel.
Mugler's fragrances are mostly unisex. There's nothing about them that pins them to one gender. The same can't be said about their fashion, however. Alien smells out of time and place with its egregiously synthetic bombast, while Womanity smells like something that would have been better left forgotten in some '70s porno. Angel managed to survive its zeitgeist and stay relevant in the 21st century, smelling just as new and wearable as it did twenty years ago. If that's not transcendence, I don't know what is.