I have been eyeing this one for a while. A leaky Jean Patou Mille, whose rose patchouli vapours long infiltrated the Kamakura antiques shop in which it was ensconced.
I finally snapped it up yesterday, transferring its trail of supercilious franco-reverie to our house.
Placing it in a prime position in the most treasured vintages on the dresser by my bed, I found it hard to sleep last night : this old parfum, macerating in itself for decades is so intensely potent it affected me at various levels of (sub) consciousness, almost approaching brain nausea.
Do you know 1000? (pronounced ”Mille?’)I would love to hear the opinions of aficionados, those sworn to the enigmatic witchery of the vintage only (I also have an edt and an edp, both effective) though the sly, oiled luminescence of the serpentine extract really does take some beating.
Mordantly, effortlessly elegant, 1000 is quite a peculiar perfume – making its statements but also somehow unexpressed : a classical floral chypre centered on violets and osmanthus with herbaceous green edges; delicately animalic, sandal-musked base, and a rich, dark red geranium-stained , Joy-echoing rose that inhabits the heart.
At the same time, there is also an explicit sensuality hidden within the implicit good taste of this Patou : the 1000 of the name referring to either the alleged one thousand attempts perfumer Jean Kerleo made to attain perfection, or, if you watch the old advert, the number of times…
If you can get your hands on a good bottle, 1000 is a perfume with a fascinating evolution. The particular bottle I bought yesterday – for twenty five pounds, a reasonable deal, has possibly lost some of the strange green beauty of the jade / red smaller 7ml iteration, in which the slow slide from green plants to osmanthus, apricot and lucid violet, with whispers of papery muguet slowly descends to a more subtly pheromonal, chypric leather base.
But this bottle also has an added richness, containing the very essence of Patou 1000. And though I had to move it to another room – just too distracting for sleep – what would I be dreaming of ?- its inspired emanations -will have to rise up into my writing room instead, taunting the surrounding greenery.
So many vintage perfumes walk the line between brilliance and excess. Patou does it perfectly, elegant yet sensual refined but unsettling.
How lucky you are to find such gems.
UNSETTLING.
That is the word. And what a great thing that can be..
I’ve always thought Roja Dove’s Haute Luxe was very very similar to 1000. I first discovered Haute Luxe many years back and thought it was the most expensive smelling perfume ever (somehow mentally came to that conclusion). Years later, a blogger send me a sample of the EDT of 1000 (from the 90s). I thought it was the same scent with a different far dry down. I think I am going to spritz some of the EDT now. They don’t take scents like this anymore.
Oh no! Most of the gorgeous florals are gone from my decant. Oh well, the base is still nice. I can top it up with some airy florals. The decant I have is also from the 90s. I do have some 60-70s Joy (edit and parfum) around. Will need to check if the jasmines are still alive in those.
They truly don’t.
Mille was a gift from my mother. I sort of adored it. Green, yes a floral millefiori but the violet became too all encompassing, too present. In the end Mille wore me. It was like wearing a fussy, vintage gown, stilettos, full makeup & rollered set hair held by a can of Elnett. All well & good if your life is spent “out out”. At the time I had 2 boys under 4 & worked on an Infectious Diseases ward. Neither was a good fit.
I sold it after many years of not wearing her. I don’t regret that sale. I am now a mature woman & would likely be able to carry Mille off. Would I want to? That’s still debatable
For me, despite what I write about it here, 1000 is also not 100% pure love ( also WHY I love it – such perversity!)
It IS a bit clenched
and today the violets were freaking me out
Hi Neil! 🙂
I have many second-hand bottles of “1000”, and all are interesting in their own manner.
I’d say that there are 4 categories of “1000”.
1° The bad latest EDT and EDP bottles from Proter and Gamber (P&G) era.
Their are nice as a dry floral for a man, but still too faint and deprived of luxurious details. So they are a bit useless for me, who like expansive (and expensive) floral bouquets.
2° The bad conserved old EDT and EDP. They are too abstract.
They are a lesson in frustration, because most of the versions of “1000” don’t feel luxurious.
Instead they express some sort of minute luxurious details, self-restraint, and a blurred silhouette. They are old-money, and borderline pearl-clutching.
Sometimes they smell of fresh violet, sometimes they smell of hard candy violet, in a vague jasmine-ish woody-ish frame.
3° The excellent old EDT, where some vivid notes are popping out of the abstraction.
– The best are the one in the big ugly green plastic 60 milliliter, that worked with refills.
In all of them, the galbanum opening in perfectly balanced. I kinda remember the rainbow effect from galbanum, the ylang-ylang, the jasmine, and the foreground music, like a nice vintage music box.
– The other old, but not too old EDT, in the tall rectangular spray bottle.
They have a yellow golden plum effect in their jasmine, at the beginning. It’s a bit like the yellow plum at the beginning of “Femme” parfum de toilette. Something in the jasmine, probably it’s a grandiflora jasmine (before its dosage was restricted in the 00ies), that already delivers a sort of cinnamon and bubblegum spicy effect on its own.
4° The good extrait, that hold their promises of strength and olfactory journey.
I also recently bought a very partial 15 milliliter bottle recently for 26 euros.
The evaporation was due to the fact, that the stopper was not firmly in place, because some of the leather husk of the “baudruchage” got in the way, once the previous owner opened it. I knew that
It’s the first time that I catch the cassie (or is it mimosa too?) and honey extract in 1000. And transparent sandalwood. (Said like that, it is a few step closer to “Gold man” from Amouage, that you own too, if I remember well. Is it time for a layering? 😀 ).
This version is very rewarding for an amateur, that has learnt to detect and appreciate some rare ingredients along the previous years.
Despite my efforts, I never caught the osmanthus in “1000”, in any versions, despite what the blogs are saying.
Grandiflora jasmine has the biggest part, and the whole abstraction (with a few visible ornamentations) are pushing back the probable osmanthus as mere tea-like inflexion.
(Also Joy was retconned as having champaca extract on some sites and commercial blurb, that spicy orangey variation on Chinese magnolia leaf and flower natural extracts. Usually, those ingredients where said to have been available only since the 90ies for Tocade (caugh sirup inflexion debut, then added sparkly green details) then J’adore (in its first versions, with added golden white grape in the sillage, close the methylanthranylate and added drama (dark purple plum and the velvet touch of “ivy”, mostly probably synthetic nitrile violet leaves now forbidden) ).
Those old extrait are also the ones, with a Mitsouko fata morgana at some point in time.
At moment of the evolution, as a sort of second heart accord, Mitsouko appears in all its glory, at the junction of the very DRY chypre-ish oakmoss cistus (?and cedar?), where they are fusioning with the very WET expensive flowers extracts : iris, rose absolute, and white flowers as a whole.
Also there are these extra hints of ambergris, and maybe a tiniest touch of deer musk and honey wax, that gives a sort of breathing realism to this odd beast.
The rest of the drydown is different to Mitsouko, maybe because a sandalwood gains prominence in it, despite the abstraction. I sorta remember that Jean Patou would have had access to special sandalwood, old ones, according to the hearsay, some century-old something sandalwood.
The latest version of the extrait was strong on the hedione (synthetic water jasmine), and allegedly a baffled Jean Kerleo would have asked to amateurs if they thought too, if P&G had ruined the balance of 1000 extrait.
I’ve got one. The radiance is strong on this one, with a nice subliminal effect for people around you, probably because of a bigger part of synthetic laundry white musks. I wore it once or so, and I weirdly like it, because it’s equal part comfort for the wearer, and subliminal lofty intimidation for everyone else.
5° Last but not least, the speculation has not reached those perfume brands yet, and people seem to forget that those extraits came in crystal bottles.
I like that those crystal bottles were bigger and thicker than the “Joy” one’s of the same volume, with that extra gold adorned cap 🙂
(That said, I don’t think that I would have thought it worth it, to buy one bottle of “1000” extrait at retail price. I was not born in the 70ies, but one bottle of “1000” extrait always cost something like a month of rent for one’s flat, or even more. It would have killed most of the fun of “1000” for me, I think.
Wow – unbelievable 1000 knowledge – and I do know some of what you say here about the difference between the iterations. The P + G versions were flat and dull.
As for the osmanthus, in the jade parfum I used to have, the absolute of that luscious flower was VERY apparent and the reason I loved it so much. As you say, some Milles have incredibly luxurious materials while others feel devoid !
Just catching up! How lovely that you’d write about 1000, and happy for your score. Nice. It’s probably in my Top Ten of all time. Julien’s experience with it is pretty much mine. I do think that the jade bottle era/formulation in extrait was its apogee. (Between edp and edt, I always found the edt much nicer; leaner, racier, more focussed, more “Mille.”) Plus what an incredible bottle itself, and the box, and the satin and everything. I have quite the stash. I started hoarding from my twenties. Hope you’ve been well, dear N.
I haven’t – but love this brief encounter x
Well. Goodness. I’ll have to dig deeper to find out what you’ve written about your current state, or stay tuned for a deep dive. Either way, sending you love.
And to you back
V glad Canada is galvanized against The Bitch: good work !
This gives me some inkling: ” . . . all that really matters ultimately is a deep appreciation of what surrounds us, a quest for understanding , and the bonds of friendship and love that bind and sustain our souls – while simultaneously grieving their impermanence; the coursing veins of mortality that exist in every heartbeat – but which also give this mysterious life that we have exquisite meaning.”