The celerity with which a forty year-old vintage of Jean Patou's Joy develops on skin makes a hangry adult Cheetah seem laggard by comparison. Despite this, the fragrance maintains a core fidelity that is, as far as I can tell, unshaken in its years. The sparkling aldehydic peach of what were once luxurious top notes is now simply a candy-pert sweetness, and just seconds after application a true onslaught of jasmine tsunamis the senses. The floral chords are lush, and the beige resinous woods supporting them are representative of a perfume rarity: natural materials. I do not own a bottle of vintage Joy, but was fortunate enough to wear the contents of one, and I have some thoughts.
We should pause to absorb the sad (and frankly avoidable) development that Jean Patou, a brand that tailored clothing and manufactured perfume for a century, no longer exists. It is now just "Patou," and while clothing is still pitched, accessories for olfactory pleasure are not. I don't know who gets the blame for this. Patou's Wikipedia page stops short of painting LVMH as part of the story of their demise, while Fragrantica seems hellbent on blaming the boogeyman. You don't need a boogeyman for this one; if I ask a tenth grader why a ninety-two year-old perfume for wealthy Depression-era women no longer exists, the answer would accurately be something along the lines of, "Because wealthy Depression-era women are pushing up daisies right now."
But do today's daisies for yesterday's jasmine blossoms sound like a fair trade? The fragrance community is plagued by rumors of countless products being crammed with natural materials, and Joy is no exception, save for the fact that the rumors are mostly true. It really did require the essence of an ungodly number of flowers, reaching well into the thousands, to yield a single ounce. And you can smell it. Henri Almeras, French perfumer for Patou, was trained by the legendary Ernst Beaux of Chanel No.5 fame, and he understood how the interplay of aldehydes and lactonic fruit esters can elevate an otherwise dowdy white floral arrangement into a "modern" sphere. His work in Joy is aggressive. The jasmine is rich, fluorescent; the rose note lends an interesting coolness to balance their tropical balm; the sandalwood and hints of animalic musk are a smooth foundation for such a poised model.
This sounds textbook by classical French perfumery standards, but I needed all of three minutes to realize that I was wearing the fragrance equivalent of what the Japanese call kanawa tsugi, or the joinery of building materials without the use of nails. Everything in Joy is familiar, everything is conservative and terrestrial by today's standards, yet the entire composition is a pristine example of obsessive fit and finish. Where the majority of feminines, including Joy's contemporaries, rely on heady mosses and musks to make sense of the fruits and flowers, Joy lets the secondary traits of each material match up with the next. Aristocratic names employ little more than pins, while the rest rely on railroad ties. Joy simply allows the overripe edge of peach to introduce the indolic facet of jasmine, which in turn finds the tawdry skank of civet, with the ensemble melting into the dried earthiness of resins and woods. This is as close to art as it gets.
As someone habitually critical of vintage and discontinued fragrances, my grey matter was operating on overdrive throughout the wearing experience. All the usual pitfalls were present - the aforementioned drydown speed, the slight muddling of accords, the unbalanced base - and though they jumped out at me, I didn't care. The sweetness of whatever was left of the top notes was uplifting, and, pardon the pun, "joyful," and the floral notes were so clear and realistic that I couldn't bring myself to feel disadvantaged by my proximity in time to this perfume's original materials. Sure, the petals were plucked decades ago, but they still felt as fresh and dewy and alive as they ever did. This is either the result of finally getting my nose on something good after an eighteen month pandemic, or Édouard Pinaud's words from his memoir are true, "Perfumes are really the most delicate beholders of our past life."
Or perhaps it's both.