Parenting and Paradigms
There I was, engulfed in an eye-level cumulonimbus cloud, heavy, saturated to the point that I thought it might rain liquid cotton candy. My senses were overwhelmed and I felt cramped short human bodies moving thru aisle as if in an art farm, the din of undistinguishable chatter, small bottles of unknown use, and loud high-pitched perfume chained to the wall, like beauty prisoners or maybe just on beauty house arrest.
So what brought me to this strange land?
My teenage son listed “cologne” on his birthday list and I just knew that it would involve a trip to Sephora. I could have taken him to one of the lovely stores that sell niche and indie brands in town (Orcas Paley, Immortal, Nasreen). I could have swiped him ouds from halfway around the world from my personal stash. I could have sprayed rare discontinued perfumes that could easily sell for over $800 USD on ebay. I could have suggested samples of oddities that smell like bananas, burnt electronics, or rusty metal. Ultimately and unsurprisingly, these don't interest most teenagers. They have their own greasy motives, from flexing to maxxing. They have their favorite bottles in the form of pistol chambers, placed on dressers like artefacts in some type of masculine museum. They also have their own scent language that I sometimes struggle to understand, but am endlessly fascinated by.
We struck a deal that we could go to Sephora to test, but we would have to buy elsewhere (i.e. not supporting Sephora). This concession highlights my general approach to parental tastemaking and influencing. Like perfume, I've gone relatively light on directed style, music, and movie recommendations with my son. I would rather he discover things himself and develop his own ideas, tastes, and style. While I'm well aware that our kids internalize our views, prejudices, and ideas of the world (whether we want them to or not), I've seen more than a few hipster dads try to actively force their tastes on their kids and it comes off as desperate as the kids parrot these tastes back to whomever will listen. Your kid's four and his favorite group is the Wu Tang Clan. Sure. Did your daughter choose that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari tee shirt to wear for picture day herself? Ok. Have you noticed this nostalgic generative turn or am I being an old crank? Not only is this heavy-handed glory days approach a walking billboard of the parent's self-perceived coolness, it's also a surefire recipe for later outright rejection. Think back to your teenage years. How often did you listen to your parents about anything let alone anything related to style and music? Why is it any different now when YOU say it? Right, you're a lot more hip than your parents. Ok. Gotcha.
Even more, I've seen dads armed with the best intentions take up their kids' hobbies in hopes of forming some type of real connection only to have kids move on without looking back, leaving dad with the pristine condition skateboard or the new stiff baseball glove. "But you used to love baseball, sport." Ok, that example reads a bit Hallmarkian, but it largely rings true. My son's interests have shifted over the years, but I've found creative ways to connect without resorting to the usual tired dad tropes and without relying on expensive equipment and consumer goods.
My son and I connect primarily through ribbing and wordplay though not in the egghead Wordle/Will Shorts way. "This word has 8 letters, but the second letter is also used in a word that relates to bird anatomy." No. Our sense of connection is more of an organic playful banter of names, misnaming, absurdism, made up words, and slang. For instance, we constantly rename the cats. Our cat Arnold is now temporarily: Arnold von Sandwich, the party prince. [I've recently learned that not everyone changes the names of their cats frequently.] We’ve also recently named the cast of characters we routinely see on our short drive to his school and add more as they reoccur in our morning production.
Back in the depths of the black and white striped sugardome, I gave him carte blanche, the only instruction being to narrow his choices down to two perfumes so that he could wear them out on each hand and also spray on strips to take home to do a clear-headed comparison. Did I dadspain what he was smelling? Nope. Did I enumerate aroma chemicals likely to give the impressions he was getting? Nope again.
Initially, he was drawn to Dior Sauvage Parfum. Of course, I was silently hoping that he wouldn't choose to run with Johnny Depp, his swift pack of wolves, and/or the hoards who wear this. For those who haven't smelled this omnipresent profile, it has a fresh and sharp desert guitar citrus top like the original, but dries down to a sweet candied mess, a progression which reads as a metaphor for Depp's life. My son mentioned this abrupt right turn of the fragrance without prompting, an astute assessment from someone who doesn't think about perfume structure and materials all the time. Its brightness completely withered away to the parfum parlor trick of adding overdosed vanilla materials to signify depth and density to concentration-obsessed customers.
After we got home and returned to olfactive stasis, he chose Prada Paradigme, EDP, a 2025 release by Marie Salamagne, Bruno Jovanovic and Nicolas Bonneville, all of Firmenich. I'm not familiar with Nicolas Bonneville, but I know Marie Salamagne mainly from Mimosa and Cardamom for Jo Malone. Essentially, it does what the box says, cardamom and mimosa, but it deftly captures the textural and polleny aspects of mimosa with a dash of cardamom. I also know Jovanovic primarily from Frederic Malle's Monsieur, which is a refined vanilla, rum, and squeaky clean almost rubbery patchouli.
Prada Paradigme, however, feels like a departure from these slightly more interesting releases for slightly more interesting brands. Paradigme contains a citrus element with a geranium, something I could distinguish in on the strip on the ride home. It had a softness, almost a humming rosy quality that I thought well done for a newer masculine marketed perfume. From the strip and my hand, it conjured the ghosts of men's fragrances past with a touch of modernity. My inner soft boy was excited for this purchase. I love Houbigant's Fougere Royale, Chanel's Boy, and other fougeres with a touch of powdery soft coumarin-dusted mosses. I thought Sauvage's leather vests, midnight blue fedoras, heavy eyeliner, and boho/Roma wannabe jewelry would be nowhere to be found. In fact, Tom Holland is the boy next door spokesperson for Paradigme. He seems as far away from Depp as humanly possible and I thought a fitting poster boy as he stared back at me from the in-store ad. They are both safe, inoffensive, and without edge. It's what you would take home to meet your mother. "That's a nice sweater, Tom. Tell me again what you do for a living"
The scent we received was drastically different. I bought it from a major retailer so I'm convinced it wasn't a fake. He liked it, but to me, it was all sharp and slanted spices similar to the gingery feel in his signature scent, YSL L'Homme. Almost completely gone is the cleverly-used geranium too. It's heavily muted or mottled if at all here, which is too bad. More disappointingly, it included a giant sweet slug of modern vanilla materials. It's not enough to register on a geiger counter, but quite enough to creep into the top of the perfume. I attribute my earlier excitement to an olfactory hallucination brought on by Sephora's sensory payload. It could also be that I simply wanted it to smell soft, masculine and vintage, stuffing all of my desires into that little emerald bottle.
When Thomas Kuhn wrote about paradigm shifts in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he was referring to sea changes in thought and knowledge production specifically within the scientific community. This term eventually broke free from its academic fetters and all kinds of paradigms supposedly shifted, from those in the bedroom to the boardroom. Prada's Paradigme is aptly named. It merely forms part of the prevailing modern masculine scent paradigm in the more popular sense of the word. It fits in. It passes. It keeps its head down. It's perfect for teenagers not eager to be noticed because they simply all smell that way. 1-2-3. Citrus-Spice-Candy.
Though the modern connotation of the term is "model," Prada's new perfume is anything but. It's clearly a follower. Despite my overly eager early impressions of it, Paradigme hasn't shifted anything. It offers nothing new or different to the style. What it has done is reinvigorate my love of geranium and fragrances; it makes me want to (re)create that rosy geranium that I thought I was smelling in the car ride home: mossy, coumarin, rose, geranium, heliotropin, and a touch of citrus. Paradigme smells as if you were walking behind an overspraying teenager who is helping his distinguished grandpa across the street, the brashness of youth overshadowing a long respectable life.
Speaking of geranium, here's a little dronish creation based on the GMSC peaks of Egyptian Geranium from Eden Botanicals (lot 18) and a sample from a disco raga from the 1970s. If I could figure out a way to automate these peaks to make them more accurate, I would, but you'll just have to deal with all-of-the-lofi.
https://on.soundcloud.com/AwdpJheaY5TVnkf8F3
Enjoyed this. Lucky kid! I’m sure you’re making the kind of impact that will be remembered in meaningful ways later in life. So important to let our loved ones find their own way.
I also laughed at “greasy motives” 😄 - so true.
My mom and another person important to me had that connection through wordplay/banter, a source of real amusement, and a thing hard to explain to others.
Some of this writing reminds me of Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait, worth a read if you’re ever interested in exploratory reading. He calls himself absurdist.