From an early age, perfume always played a prominent role among the women in my family. Living in a tiny flat in Haringey, with my mother and observant grandmother, our kitchen was strictly kosher, while our bathroom — with its scents of YSL Rive Gauche, Clinique Aromatics and Matey bubble bath —was a self-contained, glamorous universe, an escape from the noisy neighbourhood where we lived.
Scent has always seemed closely linked with Jewish culture, not least given its significance in religious rituals. There’s the strongly scented etrog or citron fruit during Succot, and there is also the havdalah spice box, where scents like cloves, cinnamon or cardamom are used to mark the end of Shabbat. The very word for smell in Hebrew, reyach, is a derivative of the word ruach, or holy spirit. There are Jewish blessings over smelling sweet scents, just as there are for food. And in the Torah, the mishkan temple is described as being beautifully perfumed at its centre, where the most holy items were placed — with scents including galbanum (a plant resin with a rich, mossy scent), frankincense, and other spices.
For writer Lauren Carbran, perfumery really became a part of her life — by coincidence — when Judaism did. “Both my parents are Jewish but I wasn’t raised in the faith,” she explains. “I was on a trip to Israel organised for young Jewish professionals where I really reconnected with my Jewish heritage, and the scents of the spice markets and the salty sea near Tel Aviv were a big part of that.” It was on that same trip that she met her now-husband and was struck by the fragrance he was wearing. “I met Phil in the airport security line. I’ll always remember what he smelled like — Paco Rabanne 1 Million, which he also wore for our Orthodox Jewish wedding.” (She wore Chloe Love Story.)
Unlike Lauren, my love of fragrance didn’t coincide with a fairytale meet-cute with my future-husband (much to my mother’s chagrin). But working in the beauty industry, there was always something that drew me to this world — especially reading about the likes of Jewish entrepreneurs Estée Lauder and Helena Rubenstein. Formidable doyennes of their respective beauty empires, they were responsible for some of the most famous blockbuster fragrances of the 1950s such as Youth Dew (Lauder) and Noa Noa (Rubenstein).
Contemporary players in Jewish perfumery are just as trail-blazing. Among them is Linda Pilkington, a five-foot, fragrant firecracker, who is the ‘‘nose’’ and founder behind Ormonde Jayne. Pilkington’s scents are nothing like many of the conventional bland and pretty perfumes you tend to get on the high street. Her unique concoctions have guts, designed to leave an impression when the wearer walks into a room.
Pilkington even offers to dial-up the concentration of each scent, to give them a little more chutzpah if needed. My favourite of hers, Tsarina, is inspired by Russia’s golden age of opulence. Announcing itself in smoke-laden plumes of suede and jasmine, with sultry undertones of amber and vanilla, it brings to mind fictional heroines like Anna Karenina, together with my glamorous great aunt, who was a milliner and an all-round larger-than-life character (early photos show her swaggering around Shoreditch in the 1930s wearing tailored men’s suits). One suspects Pilkington’s bold perfume style is partly inspired by the equally elegant women she grew up with, not least her mother.
“My mother worked in a hospital and was somebody who dressed smartly, with a brooch in the collar,” she muses. “If she wasn’t in a suit she was in a nice dress, and had her hair styled at the hairdressers every week and wore lots of perfume. She wasn’t the type of mum to walk around in her slippers! I guess, growing up, that sort of thing rubs off on you.”
The type of well-dressed (and well-fragranced) lady of the house is something that Pilkington sees as a cultural mainstay, especially from her time spent living in Israel. “Traditionally on Fridays, Jewish women tend to spend the day getting themselves ready for Shabbos and making their house look beautiful,” she muses. “There’s always an element of striving towards beauty, of looking —and smelling — the best you can.”
The ingredients Pilkington uses are just as intriguing as the scents themselves. Before our chat, she emails me details of several recipes for holy anointing oils and incense described in the book of Exodus, which included precious raw materials such as myrrh, galbanum, frankincense and various spices. Her fragrance Tolu — a warm, ambery concoction — contains quite a few of these ingredients, as do various other perfumes, especially niche ones. Why does she think they have persisted over time?
“Those ingredients can just hold a perfume extremely well,” she reflects. “You can put them into either a floral or an oriental or a spicy scent and they work wonders — they’re so versatile. They’re a good way to make a perfume that has an element of glamour and sophistication. Frankincense and myrrh have great silage [the trail a perfume leaves behind] and they subsequently work extremely well in candle oils as well.”
Another pioneering perfumer is New York-based David Seth Moltz who founded fragrance line DS & Durga with his wife Kavi. He famously worked on a range of fragrances with Duran Duran —inspired and named after four of their songs. Hungry Like The Wolf (the fragrance) is a rich, leathery number, with warm, earthy notes of cedar and patchouli — and pretty much conjures up Simon Le Bon’s character in the song’s video: tanned and handsome, dashing Indiana Jones-style through the jungles of Sri Lanka.
Although perfume wasn’t an integral part of Moltz’s American-Jewish childhood, music certainly was. “As far as classical music goes, so many of the major conductors of the 20th century are Jewish and there was always that running through the current of my childhood,” he reflects. “My father is deaf in one ear and he listens to music so loud you can hear it down the street!”
Moltz believes his heritage definitely plays a part in all the perfumes he creates. “DS & Durga is the joint vision of Kavi and me. And part of my cultural identity as an American urban Jew definitely runs through it,” he notes. “Especially the smells of my childhood growing up in New England: the salty ocean, the forest, the scents during the festival of Succot — especially the etrog citron.”
The rich aromatic scents of Jewish festivals also played a prominent role in the upbringing of world-renowned perfumer Carlos Benïam, who was raised in the Sephardi community of Tangiers, Morocco. Benïam famously created White Diamonds for Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the modern classic Flowerbomb for Viktor & Rolf, among others.
One of my personal favourites is his dazzling and timeless creation for Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle called Eau de Gardenia; a sparkling citrus floral, grounded by rich, enveloping notes of vetiver and patchouli. (It was, for a time, my go-to scent during one particularly romantic summer in Notting Hill.) One can imagine it also being reflective of the blissful scents of Benïam’s childhood.
“Growing up in the Sephardic culture, there was a certain rhythm of life always around the holidays in terms of all the specific flavours and smells related to each festival,” Benaïm explains. “During Rosh Hashanah, for instance, there was a certain custom of mixing Swiss fennel with sugar to symbolise the beginning of the sweet year. Everything was always related to smells and plants of the Mediterranean. Succot was always very interesting for me as a child — and I used to help with the buying and preparation of the etrog.”
Like Pilkington, Benïam likes to work with many of these ingredients that burned in the holy temples thousands of years ago.
“At the time, these raw materials were burnt to create that spiritual incense that would bring people to a higher place,” he notes. “It was seen as sacrilegious to reproduce them for personal use, but I use them in my creations all the time! Each one individually brings a magnificent order to a perfume. Take galbanum — it’s a wonderfully strong sharp green note; very few things in nature can be extracted and smell so interesting and so green.”
For Benïam, recalling these scents holds a particular poignancy, as his family’s community was driven out of Morocco shortly after the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967. “Obviously, all the smells and tastes of my childhood have disappeared. The Sephardic world in Tangiers where I grew up is no longer there,” he explains. “All those experiences I had, I recreate through perfume using these ingredients. Smell has such a strong link to memory after all.”
Whether perfume is used for nostalgia or escape, to heighten spiritual practice or just to smell good, for me, there’s also just something about fragrance that encapsulates Jewish culture so well. The following description that I once heard from an industry friend pretty much sums it up.
“A perfume is light and dark, highs and lows. It’s not one shade, one note or one sound. It’s about nuance and contrast; it’s a continuous swirl.”
