Bird of Paradise (Avon)

Avon is sort of a mind-warping brand for fragrance enthusiasts. On the one hand, it's a cheap and somewhat gimmicky mail-order concern that is representative of every twentieth century archetypical "consumerism" paradigm imaginable. You want a fragrance? Don't have a lot of cash to spend? Here's the Avon catalog. It has two hundred items for quick order this season, and another two hundred available at the end of the year. Next year another few hundred will roll out, and none of them cost more than eight bucks. Pick a title and it'll show up at your door in a week. That was how Avon worked from 1940 to 2016, which was when Cerberus Capital Management inked an acquisition deal and sent the brand to Latin American countries, where it continues to enjoy success.

On the other hand, Avon is a serious historical oddity of a brand that has released more perfumes than virtually any other company. The casual observer may think it's a cheapo throwaway name, but those who are in-the-know view it as a playground for big-name perfumers, including Olivier Cresp, Harry Frémont, Laurent Le Guernec, Rodrigo Flores-Roux, and Sonia Constant, among others. People of their pedigree consider Avon to be a safe testing ground for unusual ideas, a place where experimentation and freedom of expression can occur without much risk of their careers going up in flames. If you try out a new girly-floral idea that incorporates durian fruit and the result sends people running for the exits, you'll be given a good brief for Dior the next day, because nobody minds if an Avon perfume doesn't sell. Avon has something like three thousand perfumes under its belt. A failure could live in their range for years before they even notice it. 

Things get even more interesting when you look at what was released in the sixties and seventies. Take Bird of Paradise, for instance. Released in 1969, this stuff was a bridge between the patchouli head-shop vibe of the hippy free-love era and the open-collared Stepford/Nixonian decade that followed. It came in a variety of bottles, but its earlier incarnations were clear glass with gold caps that were shaped to fit whatever sculpted image Avon was having fun with that day. The original was a rather pretty peacock, but it also came in a fairly uninteresting rectangular bottle and a smaller "golden thimble" bottle, which is the one I own. How does it smell? It's formal but affecting, a Schiff base derived from methyl anthranilate and an aldehyde, upon which one of history's more opulent drugstore orientals was built. Bergamot, lavender, a hint of pineapple for fruitiness, honey for sweetness, florals and greens, sandalwood (a surprisingly high quality synthetic but not Mysore, contrary to popular belief), and incense. No masterpiece, but nice. You get more than you paid for here, which is how Avon has persevered for over a century.