SULTRESS. ::: BALAHÉ by LEONARD (1983)

They don’t make them like this any more. But perhaps for that we ought to be grateful. While the bottle you see above – a vintage miniature picked up for free at a jumble market – fits snugly onto our kitchen knicknack shelf, and will be forever treasured (I love anything Léonard, and have a collection of flower patterned vintage seventies neckties that I enjoy), I will not be actually wearing Balahé – a seethingly slow-burning and erotic floriental that smells of cougar’s mother – anytime, in the near future, on myself.

It is so torrid.

Hailed by vintage scenthusiasts as a more tasteful, yet more full-bodied precursor to Dior’s Poison, with its plum-tuberose-opoponax theatrics, as well as a direct influence on Cacharel’s Loulou – Balahé is said to smell just like our beloved Loulou, and I concur —-just without ever having set foot in the tropics : there is no coconut nor tiare.

There is orchid, though (a lot of it ::) and orange blossom, jasmine, ylang ylang, rose, orris and civet – a thick, impeccable, powdery heft that feels like the original L’Ombre Rose extrait by Jean Charles Brosseau. An anisic, sheening, very 80’s pineapple note up top that put me in mind of Guy Laroche Clandestine from 1986 (they are by the same perfumer, Daniel Molière); and then that base, the perfectly smooth, sweet cloying suggestiveness that claws at your brain like an unseemly vamp breathing moistly down your neck: all balsams, sandalwood, vanilla, musks … an animal lick of earthily vetiver.

Leonard Balahé is very sumptuously put together. A dark, throbbing, sultry as, feminine triumph. But just as with other perfumes from this period, of the teased up and backcombed, satin-robed Dallas /Dynasty ilk, like Yardley Lace (1982 – don’t knock it, it was created by Dominique Ropion) and Gloria Vanderbilt, also from 82 – gorgeous in its way and by Sophia Grosjman! – such perfumes are so ludicrously ‘seductive’, with nothing but seduction as their raisons d’être, they can come across as almost nauseating : the cliché of the huge haired heavily made up maneater pushing up her décolleté in the side lit bedroom mirror, applying her parfum avidly to her person as the ‘finishing touch’. The kind of (quietly thrilling) scent you know you are never going to ever quite get off your body and clothes once ravaged ; from your mouth; your eyes, your nose hair — or your memory.