Beverly Hills Gale Hayman 1989 Perfume

As you might expect from something called Beverly Hills (released as a last hurrah of the eighties in 1990) it’s a vibrant perfume – bombastic even. So bombastic in fact, tuberose – that keynote 80’s floral (and no wallflower herself) is pretty much overwhelmed by everything else that’s going on: a shiny deep red fruity note, spicy tobacco, a pot-pourri of orange, clove and cinnamon, a note of lily – backed with carnation, jasmine and cold flowers, a naughty whiff of civet, a mossy rose chypre and loads of sugary amber. Everything but the proverbial kitchen sink...

Beverly Hills is sweet – but it isn’t sickly and the children’s nursery rhyme : sugar and spice and all things nice, demonstrates that a balance of opposites (sugar -and- spice) is more interesting than just one of them on its own. There are so many opposites here they’re liable to cancel each other out, but somehow it walks the tightrope between full and fulsome and gets to the other side in one piece.

Being a self proclaimed ‘Glamour Perfume’ from the ‘ultimate Holywood Beauty Maker’ Beverly Hills is not interested in subtlety; the more – and the gaudier – the better, every dial turned to eleven. Typical 80’s in other words... Which might have you wondering if I am setting it up – just to knock it down, but no. A teacher once told me that a good way to understand a genre is to look at how it’s satirised. By exaggerating for comic effect – she said – the essential points are laid bare, so Thatcher’s cartoon nose was a foot long, and her steely resolve a psychosis...

Seen from the distance of a good three decades, it’s easy to look back and laugh at things which – at the time – seemed deadly earnest; the Giorgio’s and the Poison’s that people loved to hate. But even though they could be Too Much, they were both original compositions – unlike Beverly Hills.

According to the definition in Collins Dictionary, Beverly Hills is a pastiche:
a piece of writing or music in which the style is copied from somewhere else, or which contains a mixture of different styles.

And that’s the case here. Beverly Hills is perhaps the ultimate compendium of the decade, it summed up what had already been said; but this plenitude hides the fact that it doesn’t have a voice of its own. Its like a ‘Now, that’s what I call the 80’s’ compilation of perfume hits. Which can be fun – if you like that kind of thing, but it is little more than a copy.

And to (finally) give it due respect, Beverly Hills looked further than the tuberose Powdery Amber, Poison, and the neon chypres of the eighties, it references Opium, which was the jumping off point of the decade, and beyond that the majestic presence of Shalimar and above all Youth-Dew.

As I said, everything but the kitchen sink.