Journal
2026-08-12 · 4 minOld smells and new ones
A 1921 classic and a recent launch are two different crafts — abstraction, regulation, modern materials, and how to judge each of them fairly.
Put Chanel No. 5 and Valentino's Born in Roma on two strips and you are not comparing two perfumes. You are comparing two centuries of practice, two ideas of what a perfume is for, and two completely different sets of available materials.
No. 5 arrived in 1921, composed by Ernest Beaux, and its argument was abstraction. Nineteenth-century perfumery had mostly tried to reproduce things: a rose, a violet, a lily. No. 5 used aldehydes — materials that smell of nothing you can name in nature — to build something that referred to no flower at all. It smelled soapy, cold, faintly waxy and enormous, over a floral heart of jasmine and rose that was expensive by any standard. The point was that a perfume could be a composition, like a piece of music, rather than a portrait. Almost everything that followed in the century after inherited that idea.
Born in Roma, from 2019, is doing something else entirely, and doing it well. It is built for immediate legibility: a bright vanilla-and-woods structure with a floral face, high impact from the first spray, consistent from beginning to end. It is designed to be recognised across a crowded room and to hold up in a photograph. That is not a lesser goal. It is a different one, and it reflects how fragrance is actually discovered now.
Several forces separate the two.
Materials changed. Modern perfumery leans heavily on powerful synthetics that did not exist, or were not affordable, a century ago — the ambery-woody materials, the clean musks, the transparent woods. They are strong, stable and efficient, and they perform brilliantly under exactly the conditions contemporary fragrances are tested for. They also give a lot of recent launches a family resemblance, which is the honest core of the complaint that everything new smells the same.
Regulation changed. Restrictions on certain naturals and known sensitisers have narrowed the palette, particularly for the mossy and animalic materials that gave older chypres and leathers their depth. This is not a conspiracy. It is a safety framework, and it has a cost in character.
Testing changed. Contemporary briefs are frequently validated with consumer panels, which reward a strong opening and immediate likeability. A composition that unfolds slowly over three hours does badly in a room where people smell twelve strips in twenty minutes. The process selects for fragrances that announce themselves.
And cost changed. Orris, real sandalwood and jasmine absolute are expensive in ways that appear on a formula's cost sheet immediately, and briefs are written with that sheet in view.
One correction belongs here. The classic you can buy today is not the classic that existed in 1950. Reformulation is continuous, driven by regulation and supply, and every long-lived fragrance has been rebuilt more than once. When people say a classic has been ruined they are sometimes right, and sometimes remembering a bottle that had aged for a decade in a warm cupboard, which changes a fragrance in ways that can be very flattering.
How to judge both fairly, then.
Give a classic a full day on skin. Its structure is a sequence, and smelling only the first ten minutes is like judging a novel by its epigraph. Many people who say they dislike aldehydic florals have only ever met the first five minutes of one.
Give a new launch a second wearing a week later. Novelty is loud, and a first exposure measures surprise more than quality. The fragrances that survive the second wearing are the ones worth owning.
And ignore the calendar as a value judgement. Old is not automatically deep, new is not automatically shallow. There is thin work from every decade, and there are recent compositions that will still be worn in thirty years. The useful axis is not age but intention: what was this made to do, and does it do it on your skin.
If you want the historical detail behind any of this, Basenotes keeps long-running discussions on reformulation, and there are neighbouring notes on materials and storage in the journal.
And if the real question is which of these two directions suits the person you are buying for, that is a conversation rather than an article — contact is where it starts.
