Opium launched in France in 1977 and in the United States a year later, at a party so extravagant it's still talked about today: a chartered nineteenth-century sailing ship in New York harbour, eight hundred guests, and an afterparty at Studio 54. It also became, almost immediately, one of the most controversial fragrance names in modern history - provoking an organised American protest campaign within months of its US launch, and a formal government ban in China two decades later. This episode covers the perfumers behind the scent (working out of the same historic house, Roure, as Germaine Cellier a generation earlier), the accidental origin of the name, the party on the Peking, and the long, uncomfortable afterlife of a perfume that turned controversy into a business strategy.

Thirty-two years before Chanel No. 5, Aimé Guerlain built a perfume almost entirely out of things that didn't exist in nature: synthetic coumarin and vanillin, layered over jasmine, civet, and tonka bean. This episode tells the story of Jicky, Guerlain's 1889 fragrance including the disputed origin of its name, what its reception actually was versus the folklore version, and the quadrilobe bottle that keeps getting confused with Guerlain's more famous bees. More on the Empress who came before Jicky, over on the Substack at thefragrancememoir.substack.com.