1804 Histoires de Parfums Smells like a Pineapple Plantation Fever Dream - Paradise Perfumes Part 1
only fools rush in
Yesterday (Christmas day) I was watching a movie I like to watch compulsively more often than I would like to admit and that is Blue Hawaii (1961). Now, if you mentioned Blue Hawaii to any prior generation, everyone would immediately know what you were talking about. Everyone would know you had just watched the most beautiful slice of American tourism propaganda ever put to film. They would be able to tell you by heart the scenes of Elvis Presley on the beach at Kapua Bay saying Hawaiinisms like “Wiki wiki!,” and sipping “straight pineapple juice” (his character, Chadwick, doesn’t drink alcohol because he is good clean strapping young American war vet who is going to sell you paradise on the rocks for the next 90 minutes and even though everyone around him gets stoned on Mai Tais he is the exception, do as I say not as I do, the movie tells you, be like Elvis, the movie implores).
The movie sells you on the idea that watching Elvis Presley croon with the ukulele is better than anything else you have ever seen in your life and the movie is completely justified in selling on this idea because an Elvis movie at its best an unrelenting midcentury Paradiso that intoxicates you with candy colors and happily ever afters.
Sometime between the end of World War II and Blue Hawaii, the intoxicating fragrance of fragipanis from the Pacific islands came wafting to the Mainland, feeding whispers of a fabled paradise otherworld of exotica with tiki torches and luaus and dancing girls in grass skirts who descended from mermaids. Elvis confirmed this paradise existed in Blue Hawaii. This lead to an absolute tiki fever, with Americans making Mai Tais in earnest as they spun Les Baxter records and hung their necks with artificial plumerias during backyard luaus and nights out to Trader Vic’s.
Exotica and the longing for the mythic paradise has come and gone in the culture at large. However, for me personally, I’ve found myself lately strongly desiring a tropical world of sun-kissed skin and sand like burnt sugar. No doubt a byproduct of being stuck in the dead of (albeit a Californian) winter. And while I can endlessly play Blue Hawaii on repeat, this led to me wondering what more I can do on behalf of feeding the beast of my exotica fantasies, which in turn led me to fragrance.
Now, the fragrance world is full of promises of paradise in a bottle. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen storytellers as talented and fantastical as the people who write perfume descriptions. Fragrances will try to sell you everything short of everlasting life (and that they don’t try to sell you because people are boring and don’t believe in the power of magic elixirs made with crushed unicorn horns anymore).
This brings us at last to 1804 by Histoires de Parfums. Histoires de Parfums is a French perfume house that offers “An olfactive library that is telling stories about famous characters, mythical years, poems and music.” the perfume 1804 is an ode to George Sand, a female writer who adopted a male name and had to do with the year 1804. However, I don’t care about that because when I smell this perfume all I think of is a tropical paradise, but a mistranslation of paradise.
This led to me thinking of the depths of exotica, which actually go back much further than Elvis in the 1960s wearing a Hawaiian shirt. In particular it led me to this tapestry, called “La Récolte des ananas" or “The Harvest of Pineapples” which dates to about 1697–1705. According to the tapestry’s description, the weavers who made this tapestry would have most likely never seen a pineapple before but only had a reference of what they look like from botanical engravings. Thus, the pineapples in this tapestry are somewhat fantastic and mythic in nature and not “true to life” pineapples. Similarly, the scenes it portrays are based off of accounts of far of exotic lands, in this case China and the exotic Orient. In other words, this 18th century tapestry is tiki art before tiki art. This is also exactly what 1804 smells like to me.
As I opened my precious tiny vial of 1804 to put some on for this review, I instantly got hit with the smell of pineapples, ananas galore. Sweet, juicy, rounded pineapple, like the plantations on Hawaii where you can get Dole whip . However, this pineapple on my skin quickly became more like a pineapple from an 18th century French tapestry based on botanical engravings and accounts of pineapple that are not firsthand.
This is where the exotica comes in, breathing tropical life into a manor owned by a wealthy pineapple plantation owner. The jasmine and lily of the valley are ready for teatime, and even though the pineapple lures you into potentially going outdoors and catching the jungle fever, 1804 is too prim and proper for that and she will stay on the porch and blow the scent away with her carved ivory and silk fan. 1804 is wearing a corset and white lace, but also wants to flirt with a single tiare flower plucked from the garden that morning and served on the breakfast tray on a plate of the finest china.
1804 is sophisticated and perhaps dated, a misplaced memory of paradise, a ghost of the tropics. I don’t know if this perfume is for me and I like it but I am undecided if I will ever buy a full bottle or even a travel spray. Also, considering my sample just spilled all over me, maybe all I need now is the memory of 1804. And maybe all I really need is Blue Hawaii. Meanwhile, true paradise remains nothing more than a mirage on the horizon of my fantasies.