Yvon Mouchel's Divine: Strange Fruit

Perfume is unlike music or language in that it can’t make articulate statements without our making meaning of it. At the same time, scent has a way of insouciantly making memories and creating unspoken feelings that may never surface and become legible.

Caught on the air, Divine by Yvon Mouchel is a rich white floral with a fruit and spice opening and a musky vanilla base. The rich and lustrous scent of jasmine, tuberose, and mai rose are graciously introduced by a coriander infused peach and lounge in a sensual drydown of oak moss, musk, vanilla and spice for hours on the skin.

Divine has been described in internet perfume conversation as fancy French floral for a real lady, certainly somebody much older than you or me. Notably, in my research on the internet, most women made a point of saying that Divine was too old, too old fashioned, or beautiful but not for me. These sorts of reviews piqued my interest to speculate as to why Divine provokes this sort of disavowal.

Divine by Yvon Mouchel may be too much for a contemporary audience that prefers either comforting gourmands or what has been referred to elsewhere as “anorexic” scents. Now that double proclivity to smell either like a sugarplum or like a glass of water is a fascinating subject of its own, but today I ask: why it is that people don’t want to smell like Divine?

Divine is neither comforting nor anorexic. In fact, its surfeit of richness is off-putting in the style of that formidable tranny by the same name, the John Waters heroine, who has been known to leave packages of her own excrement on an enemy’s trailer doorstep. Divine, read dirty.

Why is Divine not the sort of perfume that women or girls today find suitable? Its gardenia recalls the gardenia that the great Lady Day wore in her hair and the excessive quality of the perfume brings to mind the lyrics of her most famous song, Strange Fruit:

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

In Divine, there is something of the “pastoral scene of the gallant south” whose rich white flowers are interrupted by an undercurrent of something sinister and of the flesh. Certainly in Brittany, where Divine was born, the association of lynching was never intended by the perfume’s creator, Yvon Mouchel. Yet an American nose smells this and thoughts turn to the twisted South. The self proclaimed perfection suggested by the perfume’s name, Divine, begs to be unveiled in all its polymorphous perversity. Lest you say this is much ado about nothing, think and smell again. Why is this excessive white floral too much? It is finely wrought, much finer surely than a host of easier white florals on the market. But it is formal, not the sort of perfume to wear in blue jeans. Maybe an antebellum ball gown would do. It is unapologetically rich, like the 1980s Givenchy Ysatis with which it shares several notes.

Divine calls to mind the sensual servitude of one of Ingres's odalisques, like this one: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Odalisque and Slave. 1842. Oil on canvas. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD. www.abcgallery.com
Is this rendition of the feminine beautiful, but just not for me?

Whether you choose to think too much like me or you take your perfume straight, no chaser, Divine is worth your time. It can be found at LuckyScent or from the company’s website Divine where it is cheaper, comes in a variety of sizes, and with excellent customer service.
Photograph: Billie Holliday, photographer unknown