Oh, How I Cried When That Aldehyde Died!

Apologies to whoever wrote, "Oh, how we cried when that Naugahyde died!"  Which is almost an Allan Sherman parody of "Chim Chim Cheree," but not quite.   And so not keeping with the thunderous luxury of the next two pages.

Allons-y!

Van Cleef & Arpels -- very fine, very expensive, as much a part of my life as the planet Jupiter.  The jewels pictured are actual size, which means very big indeed.


Go here for every page of every issue of L'Officiel, and all related magazines.  Get an iPad.  You will probably never return.  (This is the best I can do with this.  You can find it at the beginning of the November/December 1959 issue.  They are very smart over at L'Officiel and don't let you rip out their pages and decorate your blog with them.)

  

The bottle, the name, the typeface itself all stun you into submission.  Then the aldehydes deliver the coup de grace, which would be a fine name for a perfume.

I'll be every woman in the consumerized world has had a bottle of this at least once in her life.  But what is it?  It is a bit of everything, all rolled up and held together by an organic compound, our friend the aldehyde. It is "a woman."  

My other new find, Perfume Shrine, will now explain in a way I never could, how this works, and why Chanel is not actually the first to do this.  Go here -- really, do go.  It's well-written and entertaining, written by an archaeologist, not even in her first language.  

I don't feel like a woman in Chanel No. 5.   I feel like a Perfume Monster.

Let's go to the movies!  

*  A breathless nations awaits the defloration of Doris Day.

*  Much better than I had remembered.  As a jeering teenager, I hated this.  I know better, now.  Doris Day has marvelous wtf scene in taxi.  And, leaving aside the layers of Rock Hudson, or not, has anything really changed?  Lolololol.  No.

* Thelma Ritter as a comic alcoholic.  This should be appalling.  And it is -- except Thelma Ritter in every scene makes this whole thing a lot more human than you'd expect.  Especially when she advises Doris Day not to pick up men in bars:  "It doesn't work."  She's marvelous.