VINTAGE - Guerlain Jicky EDT

Jicky Eau de Toilette is a classic Guerlain scent that is unique, original and uncompromising -- a scent from history that is still compelling and modern.  This is from a 1950s bottle and is vintage EDT.

This is the Eau de Toilette version of Jicky. Originally Launched in 1889, it has notes of lavender, rosemary, bergamot, rosemary, fougere harmony, opoponax, woody notes, vanilla, and tonka bean. The parfum is the very sensuous version of this fragrance, while retaining the lighter top notes. Designed for men, and appropriated by women, this is a classic. This is from a rare old vintage bottle of Jicky with all its original ingredients. A Must have.

Guerlain Jicky was created by Aime Guerlain in 1889 as a parfum extrait. The eau de cologne was launched in 1945 and the parfum de toilette in 1987. Jicky is a unisex (probably the world's first) fougere - dirty lavender on sweet hay - and features top notes of bergamot, neroli, verbena, lemon, orange and rosemary from the Eau de Cologne Imperiale formula which was used in Jicky, geranium and lavender; middle notes of mint, absinthe, tuberose, jasmine, rose, cinnamon, sandalwood, patchouli, vetiver and civet; and base notes of orris, tonka bean, ambergris, musk and vanilla. 

It was created for the Exposition Universelle and is the world's oldest perfume in continuous production. While not the first fragrance to use synthetic notes (Houbigant's Fougere Royale was the first using coumarin) it was the first of the modern abstract fragrances and is considered today by many as being one of the greatest fragrances of all times. By combining traditional cologne notes of citrus and Provencal herbs with three of the earliest synthetic fragrance compounds (linalool, vanillin and coumarin) Aime found a way to make a more creative perfume.

From Monsieur Guerlain - Frederic Sacone explains that upon researching Aime Guerlain's handwritten formula for Jicky, he discovered that it lists the famous Eau de Cologne Imperiale as one of the ingredients. Hence, Aime Guerlain's idea was to use his father's invigoratingly citrusy and aromatic cologne as a top note inside a new and completely novel perfume composition with spicy-floral, ambery and animal notes. Thierry Wasser tells us that the link between Eau de Cologne Imperiale and Jicky is an example of the continuity that plays such an important role in Guerlain's creativity, and that it's the same sort of continuity that years later led to the creation of Shalimar. That Jacques Guerlain made Shalimar by pouring ethylvanillin into a bottle of Jicky is a well-known story. However, Thierry Wasser confesses that he's not an advocate of the Jicky-plus-ethylvanillin theory, because in reality it was probably not that simple. Still, he says Jicky teaches us a lot about what inspired Jacques Guerlain: herbs, bergamot, jasmine, rose, spices, animal notes and a gourmand base - in short, the Guerlinade. 

At a time when most perfumes bore names that were descriptive of how they smelled, Aime Guerlain went against the tide and named the fragrance Jicky. We know that Jicky was the nickname of his nephew Jacques Guerlain, but Guerlain attaches a bittersweet love story to the naming. Jicky was the diminutive of Jacqueline, an English girl with whom Aime had fallen in love during his chemistry studies in England but could not pursue due to the disapproval of her family. Reportedly he created Jicky for the memory of his great love. 

In her book, Le Roman des Guerlain, historian and perfume expert Elisabeth de Feydeau recounts that Jicky was actually not made by Aime alone, but was a joint creation between him and his talented 15-year-old nephew, Jacques, whose extraordinary creativity likely contributed a great deal to the final result. 

The perfume Jicky might seem like an elementary lavender fragrance, but when you look closer it was complex, architectural, indefinable, and rich in the tiniest detail. Spicy but softly powdery, both innocent and animalic, it expressed a beautiful, seamless symmetry between refined lady and seductress. Of all its components, coumarin was perhaps the most interesting, due both to its historic newness in the lab and to its crucial role in Jicky's formula. Coumarin is a natural isolate found in tonka bean and in several grasses and plants. It is overall sweet-smelling, but in higher concentrations it has a biting undertone reminiscent of bitters and petrol, or even glue. This aspect was very present in Jicky, usually striking the novice as odd before settling into a state of pleasurable dependence. 

Jicky was the antidote to all prior flower-scented waters, coinciding with the beginnings of modern art where the faithful reproduction of nature gave way to impressions of light. Jicky, too, was an abstract creation that appealed to the nose on many levels, not just one, and it initiated the "emotive perfumery", a whole new attitude among perfumers who would from now on try to evoke feelings instead of copying flowers. Because it married herbs with sensual sweetness, and natural notes with synthetics, Jicky is in retrospect referred to as a "bridge scent", a link between the nineteenth century's fresh colognes and the deep oriental perfumes of the twentieth. In fact, Jicky smelled as if Eau de Cologne Imperiale, with its citrus oils, lavender, verbena and rosemary, were poured into a mixture of amber and animal materials. It sounds simple, and maybe it was, but the effect was phenomenal and has been used by Guerlain ever since. All Guerlain perfumes after Jicky have followed the same basic scheme, later called the Guerlinade, of citrus, Provencal herbs, rose, jasmine, amber, powder, and musky notes. 

Considering its very advanced age, it's staggering how relevant Jicky still is to perfumery, an ideal of imagination, balance, drydown technology, and grace. When Jicky first appeared, many women did not accept or understand it - the hint of "unclean" odour was unexpected back in those days, and it started the reputation of Guerlain as ambassador of French sexiness, for courtesans rather than for ladies. In fact, men were the first to appreciate Jicky, and it wasn't until 1912 that women's magazines began to sing its praises. By then, Guerlain had become known as a house of elegance. Today, Aime Guerlain is acclaimed mainly for this single perfume whose delicious olfactory harmony, without his knowing, was to lay the ground for the influential oriental category of fragrances and be defining for the entire Guerlain style.

From Yesterday's Perfumes -   I went and got a sample of vintage, parfum-concentration Jicky. Like a junkie seeking a hit of civet but having to wait for it to kick in, I was a little disappointed that the parfum concentration was so well-blended and rounded! Unlike the modern EDT, which gives you a one-two punch of lavender/civet, the vintage parfum Jicky took its sweet time to take off its underpants, as it were.
Like a horny teenage boy faced with a gorgeous, brilliant woman, I was not inclined to appreciate having to make small talk with Jicky before she showed me her carnal side. But, it had to happen. I got to know Jicky first as lavender, then as bergamot, easing into vanilla, and then, in the afterglow, the civet that hovered over these bright notes like the smell of sex after a romp between two freshly bathed people. 


From Grain de Musc - Is it by chance that one of the first fragrances to have burst forth from the shackles of apothecaries' recipes, the only one to have been continuously produced since its launch in 1889, has been hesitating for so long on its gender attribution that its sex is still undetermined? To this day, no one really knows if Guerlain's Jicky was first meant for men or for women: at the time, all scents were shared. 

In his Perfume Legends, Michael Edwards ponders at some length on the hesitation that surrounded Jicky's birth. According to Philippe Guerlain, "Jicky was such a revolutionary perfume that it seemed more masculine to Gabriel [Guerlain, who was in charge of business], Aime's brother. Jicky was a bit harsher than the sweet flowery notes of the time." However, men were reluctant it seems to accept the fragrance. "When they realized that Jicky was too modern for men, they decided to target it towards women", adds Philippe Guerlain.

"It is only in 1912 that women's magazines start singing its praises", explains Colette Fellous, the author of a book on Guerlain (editions Denoel, 1989), also quoted in Perfume Legends. Women, whose taste had meanwhile been educated by great abstract compositions saturated with synthetic compounds like Coty's L'Origan (1905) or Guerlain's Apres l'Ondee (1906) and L'Heure Bleue (1912), were clearly more ready to move onto uncharted territories, just at they would in fashion - Poiret had already inspired them to drop the corset. Men, on the other hand, were still encased in the stiff black suits inherited from the 19th century.

However, Jicky was, and is still shared by men and women: any perfume that can boast, among its wearers, both Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot, or Roger Moore and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, either suffers from serious gender dysmorphia or sings with the voice of an angel - who, as we all know, has no sex.

Like Balzac's Seraphitus/Seraphita, with whom Luca Turin compares it in his first French language guide, Jicky's identity has never stopped swinging back and forth. Since its birth, the combination of lavender and coumarin, the aromatic note of rosemary, the green, lacteous roundness of geranium are accords that have been widely used in masculine fragrances. But the lushness of its jasmine and rose heart, the edibility of vanillin, cinnamon-tinged benzoin and smoky opoponax gives it an amplitude that escapes any rigid classification.

Of course, Jicky hasn't survived for over a century without undergoing a few tweaks, if only because the animal substances used at the time are no longer available. I own a perfume that was probably produced pre-war and the smell has miraculously remained intact, so that I was able to compare it with a modern extrait - which fortunately remains as faithful as possible to the original. The older scent, as is almost always the case, has a smoothness and a depth that can only come when natural musk is used, as its makes all the notes pop out. The quality of the lavender seems to be a bit different. Real civet brings animalic notes that would certainly not be considered tolerable in the modern market.

A member of Makeup Alley once stated, very funnily, that to her, Jicky smelled "like a cat crapped in the lavender patch" - and she was talking about the current fragrance. Which only goes to show how Jicky, thought to be too modern at its launch, has remained improper, precisely in what links it to the near-extinct tradition of classical perfumery: the inclusion of "dirty" notes, which transform sweet-smelling blends into alchemical compositions, and allow stench, distilled in infinitesimal doses, to enrich the exquisite suavity of flowers and spices. 

The Hundred Classics Pick (Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez)