Tabac Blond-History Comes Full Circle

Tabac Blond, by Caron, is kind of a legend. Created in 1919, it was developed at a time when French women were beginning to take up smoking, and was meant to be a complement to that. It has a reputation for being edgy, chic, and sophisticated.

The first impression is of a sort of standard Caron, sweet and vanilla-floral. With the sweetness, though, comes the tobacco--cigarette tobacco, so fresh and photorealistic that there's almost an impression of a cigarette forming out of the ether.

It's a fascinating thing to smell, but the problem is that history has moved on. Where fashionable young ladies in Paris after the war took up smoking, American women of my generation largely do not smoke, and smoking has a declasse reputation that has overridden it's previous glamorous one. Cigarettes are the last thing I want to smell like.