Aromachemicals I Have Known & Loved, #2: Calone

Since I last wrote for this newsletter, I lost my way with perfume somewhat. I was creatively stuck for a while, but I'm a little bit "back on my bullshit" and have been thinking about Calone, aka watermelon ketone, aka methylbenzodioxepinone, aka 7-Methyl-2,4-dihydro-3H-1,5-benzodioxepin-3-one.

In perfume, Calone is the marine molecule. Let's sail away.

Calone is the top dog of the "watery" perfume trend of the 1990s. It is the watery trend. It is the '90s.

But it was supposedly discovered by chemists at Pfizer in 1966 in the course of attempting to create an affordable tranquilizer, which, if true, is amusing. It’s thus related in structure to such smash hits as 7-chloro-1,3-dihydro-1-methyl-5-phenyl-2H-1,4-benzodiazepin-2-one, aka Valium. Those Pfizer chemists, in their attempts at cooking up the next Mother’s Little Helper, instead discovered Valium’s stinky little cousin. Calone was shelved and patented for a rainy day. (There are no rainy days at Pfizer.)

Calone waited in the wings for two decades before its patent expired at the culmination of the eighties — and just in time! After an era of Aqua Net and Dior Poison and exotic excess, perfume veered to the aesthetics of austerity and purity and cleanliness. So swings the pendulum. The new era wafted in on a synthetic sea breeze, with fresh notes of ozone and water and toooooooooons of Calone.

the snotgreen sea

So what does water smell like? What's the aroma of "the sea" in the context of perfume? You maybe can't describe it, but I bet you know what it is. You've seen advertisements that feature abstract columns of water splish-splashing about. You've been promised a clean, well-lit fragrance.

Calone is aggressively fresh, yet notably sweet. True to its "watermelon ketone" moniker, there's a hint of melony fruitiness which can verge on cloying. But it also smells blue-green and a little salty. A bit wicked, in this regard. Not Homer's wine-dark sea but rather Joyce's snotgreen, scrotumtightening sea.

This molecule is so very much itself. Its behavior in a fragrance blend is unlike Cashmeran, which I wrote about for the first AIHKAL. If you haven't smelled Cashmeran in isolation before, it is a tough thing to triangulate. Cashmeran isn't shy, but it makes its home in the perfume's foundations; it rules from the shadows. Not so much Calone, which rules with a megaphone from a platform of filthy, melting ice.

If eau, aqua, acqua, or aqva (lol) are in the name, Calone is likely leading the charge, megaphone in hand. As a fragrance component, it's ubiquitous, and so once you smell Calone in isolation, you may feel you've seen the true face of a villain who's plagued you your whole life.

linearity & familiarity

Calone is a "top note" in that it sings in a high register and makes itself very clear in the initial blast of a fragrance. All that splish-splash seaside imagery gets corralled into the “top notes” in marketing materials. Yet Calone lingers on and on, throughout the drydown and far beyond. TGSC lists its substantivity at >600 hours, and I can only imagine the number isn't higher because nobody has been able to keep track of a smelling strip for longer than that. This extreme longevity means it tends to give fragrances a "linear" quality — i.e., smelling more or less the same from beginning to end.

Linearity is often pejorative when discussing fragrance. “Serious” perfume-lovers tend to seek the complex, the multifaceted, the prismatic. Fragrance that takes you on a journey and tells a story is treated as fine art. Fragrance that smells like nice flowers and then goes away is derided — the equivalent of processed junk food or "genre fiction." And the contexts are similar: linear tends to equate with highly synthetic, mass-produced stuff that by its very nature can’t get too interesting.

I'm definitely a pretentious sort who values complexity and obscurity. But like an excellently-crafted mystery novel or the perfect potato chip, there's a lot to be said for a great linear fragrance, and it's just as challenging to pull off.

Still, familiarity breeds contempt, and there's no more fertile breeding ground than fragrance. A trend takes the scene and all the same accords begin to pop up everywhere and grow passé. Worse, they gain associations. You smell Drakkar Noir and think, "a guy with intricately terraformed facial hair is somewhere around here." You smell Glossier You and think, "I am on a Hinge date in Manhattan in 2022 A.D." You smell Santal 33 and think "oh, okay, sure, I guess."

Through the laboratory-to-memory pipeline, certain high-impact aromachemicals become the avatar for whole subgenres of fragrance. They accumulate all kinds of baggage due to the memory-sponge nature of olfaction. They couple themselves to times and places, and grow too familiar, and eventually are loathed. It becomes impossible to to wrestle Calone into something novel.

Another thing that's happened with Calone is it's been used in home fragrance a hell of a lot: candles, room sprays, and those things that look like a bouquet of barbecue skewers sitting in a bottle. Le Labo even has a room fragrance called Calone 17. One of the most fatal insults that can be applied to fine fragrance by snippy online perfumistas is that it smells like a home fragrance. This is worse than mere linearity! As such, the proliferation of "sea salt"—type candles has put an even bigger dent in the perceived sophistication of this molecule. People get a whiff of Calone and think about the air freshener in an Uber, or a not-particularly-trendy hotel lobby.

So swings the pendulum.

You know what else has gone out of fashion since the ‘90s? Calone’s older cousin, Valium. But we’ve not seen the last of either of them yet.

smell it in

• Cool Water (Davidoff, 1988, Pierre Bourdon) — Not the O.G. (that distinction goes to Aramis New West, which I’ve never smelled, but apparently contained over 1% Calone? the mind reels) but the most-copied, for sure. The template for all watery-fresh smells marketed at dudes. I feel like I've mostly interfaced with Davidoff Cool Water via perfume samples in magazines like Vanity Fair, and I believe that's the ideal medium for Davidoff Cool Water. That's not meant as a diss at all, I just think Calone literally smells great on paper. Cool Water is good. The world probably didn’t need any more perfumes like this one, but, boy, we got them.

• L'eau d'Issey (Issey Miyake, 1992) — Epitomizes the somewhat rarer "femme" expression of Calone, leaning into the fruitiness and pairing it with white synthetic floralcy for an overall impression that's both carefree and measured, transparent and cold.

• Acqua di Gio (Giorgio Armani, 1996, Jacques Cavallier Belletrud) — Like Cool Water, this is a "masculine" Calone expression, which means a lot of bergamot-citrus and a touch of spice — i.e., the classic cologne formula bulked up on the best of '90s steroid science. I think this is the Calone people have turned against the most fiercely. It’s a recurring theme with mass-market fragrance: any scent-expression taken to the realm of the masculine gets sharpened into a pointy spear and begins to get on everyone's nerves. See also: Ambrox. There are, of course, sociological components to this upon which I don't care to dwell.

• Light Blue (Dolce & Gabbana, 2001, Olivier Cresp) — The Y2K era was a time of overexposure, acceleration, moving at warp speed. We eventually broke up in the stratosphere, and culture became fragmented again, and nothing will ever be as much of a global phenomenon as Destiny’s Child or Light Blue. There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that you know what this smells like. You think Santal 33 is overexposed? Please. Santal 33 will forever be niche compared to Light Blue. It smells like lemons and Calone.

• Invictus (Paco Rabanne, 2013, Veronique Nyberg, Anne Flipo, Olivier Polge & Dominique Ropion) — No matter how tired everyone gets of Calone, I suppose there will always be a place for it in fragrances made for a certain type of guy. Twenty-five years after Cool Water, Invictus launched, tailor-made for the Millenial edition of that type of guy. It is the kind of fragrance that people on fragrance forums for men call a “panty-dropper.” And the worst thing is: I don’t even know if I can say for sure they are wrong. Anyway, get a load of that bottle! Impressively stupid.

• Snowy Owl (Zoologist, 2020, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz) — Indie imprint Zoologist’s artistic signature is fragrances inspired by animals. Snowy Owl tries this thing where watery-fresh-transparent top notes descend into a denser, musky-animalic base. It's interesting! I don’t really like it! And many of the negative reviews offer insight into Calone's baggage: I'm guessing the molecule is responsible for grievances like "instant blast of some indescribable frosty chemical" and "smells like a cheaply made fragrance."

calone & me

The fragrances I love to wear and make tend to be florid, blistering, capital-O ambers, and there’s little room for Calone in that world. But I do have this one formula I’ve been working at, on and off, for over two years. It’s an herbaceous-woody-fresh deal, and I almost like it. Calone has been in every iteration of the formula, in minuscule amounts, because nothing else really does the trick, and perhaps because I will feel like I’ve “accomplished something” if I can formulate a Calone perfume that doesn’t make me miserable. But I’m not holding my breath.