Better With Age?
Town & Country|May 2018

Perfumers are unlocking the mysterious qualities of vintage fragrances. Some sense the future. Others turn up their nose.

John Brodie
Better With Age?

One recent evening Julian Bedel was standing amid the cobalt-blue shelves of Fueguia 1833, his perfume shop in lower Manhattan, explaining how he came to be selling vintage batches of his artisanal perfumes as if they were fine wines. The rail-thin Argentine held two fragrance strips— one sprayed with a fresh batch of his Equation perfume; the other spritzed from a 2015 container, which sells for $394 for a 100 milliliter bottle—a 15 percent markup. An accidental alchemist, the 40-year-old still looked like the artist/musician/ graphic designer he had been until 2010—he wore a chambray shirt and jeans, his head shaved, his beard neatly trimmed. By his own admission he is “a nerd,” which became clear when he began to explain the inspiration for Equation: “It is based on the smell of outer space and Tsiolkovsky.” (Nerd Translation 1: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was the Russian scientist who developed the equation that made rocket engines possible.)

Before our olfactory journey to outer space could blast off, however, a tall blond woman wearing a white Moncler puffer and a fur hat came in and announced, to no one in particular, “I’m so happy to be back home… I want more of that perfume called Yakeñ.” Though one of the employees was ably upselling the Long Cool Woman in the Moncler, Bedel couldn’t help getting involved. “What you are smelling is the paramela plant,” he told her, referring to the element that gives Yakeñ its fruity aroma. “The aboriginal people of Tierra del Fuego, the Mapuche, handpick the flowers. In Argentina we call the paramela plant the Mapuche Viagra.”

“Well, it makes the back of my head tickle,” she responded. “My head is singing.”

This story is from the May 2018 edition of Town & Country.

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This story is from the May 2018 edition of Town & Country.

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