Scents and sensibility: bringing back Aqua Manda

Aromas can bring back a rush of memories, of Proustian nostalgia, but that doesn’t mean their precise components are an easy matter to recreate. In fact, so subjective and emotional are our responses to scent, you might even argue that it is foolhardy to try to re-invent or rediscover a perfume you wore and loved in your teens or twenties.

As Katie Puckrick, the writer and journalist who blogs on scent at Kate Puckrick Smells explains, "Perfume is subject to trends just like everything else. Tired by overfamiliarity of the dominant high street fragrance trends – caramel, cake, and berries – connoisseurs seek out mid-to-late 20th classics. Chanel No. 5 pure parfum is a favorite in rarified art world circles, while classic Guerlain masculine eau de colognes are often worn by high-ranking fashionistas.

"Context is important, too," she continues. " Patou Joy worn by a thirtysomething graphic designer is different to Joy worn by your grandmother. A teenager who wears the original Guerlain Shalimar is marking herself out as a maverick, aligning herself with the verve and daring of 1920s flappers rather than the conformity of her Marc Jacobs Daisy-wearing girlfriends ."

In that light, first time fans of recently re-launched cult fragrance Aqua Manda might think twice before dashing to Top Shop to buy their first bottle in 30 years.

"Two things get in the way of successfully reviving discontinued classics," explains Katie, "the pandering to mainstream trends, and the ever-tightening noose of restrictions from the Fragrance Association. It's an open secret in the perfume industry that even best-sellers are regularly tweaked, to the despair of fumeheads who mourn Lancome Magie Noire , Christian Dior Miss Dior Cherie (now renamed Miss Dior), and Yves Saint Laurent Opium as they were in their original, uncompromising glory.

"However, with sensitivity to a perfume's cultural legacy, and the hiring of a talented perfumer, some brands have respectfully re-introduced beloved cult favorites. Success stories include Donna Karan Black Cashmere, Yohji Yamamoto Yohji Homme , Clinique (formerly Prescriptives) Calyx , and Carven Ma Griffe. "

The latest revival in stores is Aqua Manda – not quite as high-brow as Ma Griffe, perhaps, but in its day selling in quantities of 20,000 bottles a year. Some scents sum up a zeitgeist, and for women who grew up in the Sixties and early Seventies, Aqua Manda’s mandarin, patchouli, ginger, lavender and cinnamon notes instantly evoke the hippie chick era of their youth. No wonder then that, pretty much ever since the fragrance was discontinued in 1975, a campaign has rumbled on to bring it back – reaching a crescendo in the era of social media. Perfume nostalgists forced to buy bottles of the stuff on Ebay at £80 a pop even launched a Facebook campaign called Bring Back Goya Aqua Manda, until eventually their pleas were heard by scent enthusiast Neal Cohen of Westex, who bought the trade mark with a view to recreating the scent (of which more later).

Douglas Collins founded his perfumier, later to be called Goya, in Mayfair in 1932, but it was his son Christopher who launched Aqua Manda, promoting it himself with ads broadcast on Radio Luxembourg (how very groovy). Aqua Manda’s branding, featuring a jazzed-up Laura Ashley-style print in orange and brown, was as popular as its scent, a spicy, heady blend which was effortlessly in tune with free love and the youthquake.

Setting that aside, just how do you revive a scent that hasn’t been manufactured since 1975? Culture Whisper talked to Rafael Lombard of Givaudan, the Swiss company Neal Cohen asked to recreate Aqua Manda. He, along with perfumier Carine Boin, worked on reconstructing the perfume with the help of its inventor Christopher Collins. "The code of reference for the ingredients had been lost so we had to reconstruct the original formula from scratch, using a 30-year old bottle of Aqua Manda perfume – a very difficult task, as many of the raw materials had altered with time and others had evaporated," he explained.

"So we worked with our nose, using the only bottle we had. A perfume has three facets: the head, which you can scent immediately, the heart, which you can smell half an hour later, and the core, or base note, which lasts more than 2 hours. We had the core, but couldn't manage to find the head and the heart. We had many discussions with the perfume’s creator and eventually we managed to reconstruct the whole perfume composition."

Chandler Burr is the New York Times' former scent critic and now glories in the title of ‘curator of olfactory art’ at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. For him, scent is "the equal of paint, film and clay. It has a rich palette of thousands of materials and clearly meets the criteria of 'artistic medium' in all terms: aesthetics, structure, design, the communication of an artist’s vision and subjective point of view." We’re not sure the creator of Aqua Manda would make it into Burr ’s Art of Scent 1889-2012 exhibition of ‘great olfactory artists’, but we like the notion that spritzing it on as much an act of artistic appreciation as sensory pleasure.

All the same, Bring Back Goya Aqua Manda’s 129 Facebook members seem convinced almost to a woman that the fragrance’s new incarnation just misses the sweet spot, lacking critical ingredients they can’t quite put their finger on. We’re guessing they’re the base notes of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and the first summer of love that sadly, no perfumer however gifted can bottle.





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