Interview with Madonna's Truth or Dare Perfumer Stephen Nilsen

Imperceptibly, the killer gardenia crept up on Stephen Nilsen and Katie Puckrik.

Madonna’s talents as a superstar-singer-songwriter-dancer-actor-director-producer-designer-activist-philanthropist range from phenomenal to meager, depending which side of the hyphen she’s on. Nevertheless, the entertainer has always possessed an iron-clad confidence in her abilities across all areas, marked by an insistence on doing things her way. Creating her first perfume was no exception.


Working with perfumer Stephen Nilsen, Madonna coaxed Truth or Dare from the memory of her late mother's favorite perfume, Fracas by Robert Piguet. In a conversation I had with Nilsen at the Truth or Dare London press launch in March 2012, he revealed that he had to do a little of his own coaxing in order to convince Madonna to allow musk to be used in the scent. She was adamant that it not be included in the blend of gardenia, jasmine and caramelized amber.

“She thought it was a finished perfume with only the white florals and the vanilla/amber accord,” Nilsen remembered, dismayed. "I tried to explain to her that it needed musk to round the edges, like you sand and seal a stippled wall."

Who won that battle? Read the rest of my interview with Nilsen in the Guardian to find out.

Once Madonna got into the swing of honing in on favored raw materials, she developed a hankering for IFRA-restricted ingredients. Nilsen told me, "Madonna was like any perfumer who is exasperated by how safety regulations can make it difficult to recreate the olfactive memories from our past, specifically the memory of her mother's perfume from over 40 years ago."

And how did Madonna express her exasperation? "Fuck IFRA!" she snapped.

Spoken like a true fumehead.


Read more of my interview with Stephen Nilsen here.


Photo credit: REX

44 comments:

  1. Whoohoo! You're in our very own Grauniad! I loved the idea of lobbing those 200 iterations of Truth or Dare over the fence of Madge's apartment. There's another career in cricket out there for the lobber.

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    1. Hah - Stephen N. was being a teasy-weasy about the lobbing, but he did succeed in arousing my curiosity about the 8-foot-high steel wall. I had to Google it:
      http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2011/04/26/madonna_builds_gated_community_on_the_upper_east_side.php

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  2. 200 tries,but with a dubious result, as far as the reviews go...

    She could have spent a fraction of the moolah on a crash course in perfumery & come up with a better concoction!

    Fortunately, we still have Fracas & White Diamonds to look up to...

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  3. Katie - please supply the Guardian with a new (current) profile photograph. PS Love your work.

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  4. Maybe the musks were necessary to round out the sharp white florals, but I found the blend to be disconcerting. An odd combination of piercing and nose-coating. I'm biased though. I can't stand the overuse of the synthetic musks. They give me a headache and I too blame the IFRA for limiting the perfumer's palette. Madonna's exclamation captures my sentiments perfectly.

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  5. She conceded in one interview I watched that the inspiration for Truth or Dare was the smell of her mother, who wore Fracas. It begs the question, why not just wear Fracas? I am looking forward to smelling Truth or Dare but suspect that as a creative exercise it might register as just another inculcation of another artist's output (in this case Germaine Cellier's) into her own as has been endemic thoughout her career, across multiple platforms.

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    1. Well, you could just wear Fracas, but the exercise here is to provide even more Madonna merch to the true believers. Truth or Dare smells like a more "contemporary" (i.e. gourmand), less symphonic version of Fracas. You do make a good case for it being a parallel approach to Madonna's stylistic genre appropriation throughout her career, but in fact, so many pop stars recycle, from Bowie to Beyoncé to Gaga and beyond.

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    2. And don't get me wrong, she does it well. But whereas she is always the central subject in her pop art, it is when she ceases to be the central subject in her product that her ability to be successful declines, and her talents prove meagre. A Fracas with a slug of Prada Candy in it to make it modern seems to be on the cynical end of her artistic spectrum, and as art, to my mind anyway, great perfumes tend to be the products of artists interested in that artform, rather than in another mere facet of their own self-promotion, which really is her metier.

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    3. I think that's why her movies have always been crap. She can't stop remembering that she's Madonna long enough to be someone else.

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    4. The persona can get in the way of the performance. Although I bought Madonna in "Desperately Seeking Susan", didn't you?

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    5. I wasn't born then. Was that a VERY long time ago?

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    6. DVDs can help us all catch up with pop culture, Anonymous.

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  6. "But even he was thrown by Madonna's chilly demeanour on their first meetings to produce her perfume Truth or Dare, during which she refused to remove her sunglasses."

    How incredibly rude. Any adult should have the common sense to treat others with more respect than that. I like this perfume but this article was such a turn off that I would never want to buy it.

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    1. Well, you never know...maybe she had a medical condition that necessitated too-cool-for-school sunglasses at all times.

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    2. Like a narcissistic personality disorder? Or maybe purpura due to cosmetic surgery?

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    3. The possibilities are endless.

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  7. Hi Katie how are you. I just have a new boy friend and he will take me to the cenima today. I am very nervous about which perfume to wear.Help me pleez!

    My collection:
    Bulgari Jasmin Noir edp
    Dior Hypnotic Poison edp
    DKNY Be Delicious
    Givenchy Ange ou Démon edp
    Hermès Eau des Merveilles edt
    Juliette Has a Gun Not a Perfume
    L'Artisan Parfumeur Safran Troublant edt
    L'Artisan Parfumeur Traversée du Bosphore edp
    Le Labo Labdanum 18
    M. Micallef Vanille Aoud Oil
    Nasomatto China White.

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    1. You've got some big, heavy duty perfumes there. For sitting in the middle of a captive audience at the movies, I'd go for one of the lighter ones: Not a Perfume, Traversée du Bosphore, Labdanum 18 worn lightly. All those are yummy/sexy, but not full-on overwhelming.

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    2. I will wear Traversée du Bosphore. Thank you so much.

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    3. I hope your date is awesome!

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    4. yes, it was the best date ever. He smells my neck and he told me that I smell so good. I was flying on the sky. Thanx to you and to my Fumey Godmother. lool

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  8. Does it now smell like gardenia or tuberose or are these two scents not distinguishable? As far as I understand Fracas is a tuberose and Private Col. Tuberose-Gardenia smells more like gardenia?! Cheers Cybele

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    1. Perfume Stephen Nilsen says his "narcotic floral" blend is gardenia and jasmine. Fracas has all kinds of goodies listed, including jasmine. All these white florals tend to blur into one another when used together. All I can tell you for sure is that Truth or Dare reminds me of Fracas when I smell it.

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    2. Oh, that sounds dreamy. And I do love the gardenia in this one, which I notice much more than tuberose.

      I found a bunch of samples of Fracas at a local thrift shop, of all places. I couldn't believe it. I'm sure Madonna would be very snide at this small, personal victory of mine. But I also grew up in Oakland County, Michigan, which is where she is from. Everybody there has a Madonna story. I worked with a lady once who grew up in Rochester, just a street over from the big M when they were both kids. She said in a huffy voice once, "And what's with all this Chick-o-nee stuff?! When we were growing up, IT WAS Sih-CONE!" (Referring to the pronunciation of her last name.)

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    3. Ah! Very interesting down-home insight. I can see that losing the "sick" in a budding superstar's last name would be an imperative.

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  9. I believe I was the first perfumer to publicly rail against IFRA and the EU via my blog (2007). Not being a member of an organization that belongs to IFRA, I am able to ignore their bad science and overweening bureaucracy. Of course, if there is an aromatic that is a definite problem, e.g., bergamot/photosensitization, I either don't use it, or use a warning label. My motto is "I ignore IFRA", but I do appreciate Madonna's more pithy quote.

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    1. I do believe Madonna has earned herself a slow clap of fumie approval with that pithy remark of hers.

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    2. Really? That's very interesting. I didn't know that bergamot was so dangerous!

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    3. Nora, IFRA restricts/bans raw materials for various reasons (some of them hotly contended), but it is widely acknowledged that certain ingredients, like bergamot, are photosensitive. Not dangerous, mind you, but just likely to create a skin reaction in sunlight on certain people.

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  10. I'm "meh" on the 'fume, but do believe I need the "Fuck IFRA" sentiment on a tee shirt toot suite.

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  11. My take on the interview was entirely different. Madonna's career has, in a very large part, been based upon popularizing and packaging trends for mass audiences. She did not invent "Vogueing" which was developed by the a non-mainstream portion of the gay community. She did not invent rave music but re-packaged a rave sound for one of her albums. She did not originate the role of Evita; or discover "Sondheim" but she did bring star power so that they became part of movie hits.
    Now you can either admire her as an impressio who has broadened mainstream culture by integrating fringe influences with "pop" tendencies or decry her as a copyist, or feel a little of both.
    The way she worked on perfume seems to be in accordance with her career. So she did not invent the combination of tuberose gardenia that is Fraca. Neither did Estee Lauder who made a ladylike variation of the same thing. Nor did Madonna invent a tuberose revival, which perfume cultists remember as the big thing a couple of years ago, when Killian and a whole bunch of other companies were promoting Tuberose scents. She is now mainstreaming this revival.
    On the other hand, it certainly sounds like she is one celebrity who did something more than sign her name on a contract, and then showed up to promote a fragrance's release date. She played a consistent role in its development and, if the nose was telling the truth, devoted some effort to learning the field enough to discuss it with him.
    Maybe other brands don't demand samples be brought to their apartments, but it would surprise me if they did not demand revision as a scent is developed. And I don't blame Madonna for wanting to test samples over a weekend. Much better than just taking one sniff.

    Finally, it is worth noting that Madonna is giving Fracas credit, and she is allowing the perfumer a moment of publicity as well. There are plenty other celebs who like to pretend that they just cooked up both the basic idea and the actual scent themselves.

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    1. I agree with the above anonymous too! Or at least that is one way of putting it.

      Another way of putting it might be......

      'Madonna is an artist who has collaborated with everyone and everything apart from her own imagination.'

      Hence why her product is typically an augmented version of other people's output.

      Ergo a flattened fracas with a bit of gourmand chucked in. Ergo an assemblage of tamara de Lempicka, Horst, 1930's glamour shots, a current dance craze uplifted from the New York Underground, David Fincher's skilled direction, and Shep Pettibone's house music with a sampled bassline from Love is message. Ergo a castrated Evita, whereby the original role was augmented to make Evita look nicer than she was in the original production, because that was what Madonna wanted to convey post Sex etc. Ergo poorly sung Sondheim.

      She is a genius as a self-publicist and entertainer; it can't be denied. But she is negligible as an artist, and when you pay your dollar for a product which is solely of an object form, i.e. does not actually have madonna as a subject functioning within it (as she does within photographs or audio recordings), if you do so under the illusion that it is likely to be anything more than well-done but also perfunctory, then you are also likely to be let down.

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    2. I am the anonymous above. Yes, these are two ways of viewing the same thing. I should add that I don't mind the idea of a "flattened" Fracas, although I would rather save up for Carnal Flower (which smells like leaning over to smelling a tuberose stalk and smelling the garden dirt as well as the bloom. I have not sniffed Truth of Dare, mostly because I haven't been to a mall.
      Nor have I seen Evita because a dear person at my college played the Broadway sound track constantly and if I hear that Argentina song one more time I would scream.
      However, well or badly Madonna sings, her movie Evita would not constitute "badly sung Sondheim." Evita was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Madonna sang Sondheim in the soundtrack to Dick Tracy.
      What's with the Fincher reference? I don't think she was in any his movies. Did he direct a video with her? A perfume ad?

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    3. David Fincher directed the Vogue, Oh Father and Express Yourself videos (to my knowledge) Yes I know she sings Sondheim in Dick Tracy. Each 'Ergo' is followed by a different product from her career. In order- Truth or Dare, Vogue as song and video, her performance as Eva Peron in Evita, and her singing of Sondheim in Dick Tracy, where she has very noticeable technical problems as a singer, which diminished with her training for Evita.

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  12. I forgot he did Bad Girl too for her.

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  13. Lovely piece Katie darling, but the photograph looks disconcertingly as if you are both at a funeral parlor.

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  14. Katie- a great piece, and what a darling outfit you are wearing in the photo! fun reading all the comments on this one!

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    1. Thank you kindly. Yes, the comments are rollicking on this one!

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