Fracas (perfume)

Cellier, then one of the only women working as a "nose" in formal perfumery, dedicated it to actress Edwige Feuillère, who had been the object of scandal when she appeared nude in the 1935 film Lucrezia Borgia.

Reviewing the fragrance for The New York Times, Chandler Burr detailed its notes: "Cellier packed her formula with Indian tuberose absolute, which gives it huge power and 'sillage' (the olfactory trail)....To achieve an even more lifelike, more raw tuberose (this flower smells of armpit, flesh and decay due to heavy molecules called indoles; jasmine is similarly loaded with them), she used an even larger quantity of Tunisian orange blossom absolute, plus some astronomically expensive French jasmine and Italian iris root butter.

Add natural violet leaf to give the sweet, heavy scent a refreshingly harsh, wet green aspect, iris for a woody depth, synthetic civet (the smell of unwashed construction worker) for power, the synthetics C18 for an unctuous, milky, soft tropical quality and methyl anthranilate for fizz.

"[3] Chandler Burr gave Fracas five stars and called it "transcendent", saying it has "a signature, a persistence on skin, and a diffusion that are – all three – astonishing.

Writing in the first part of the 21st century, he noted that recent reformulations had brought the scent closer to Cellier's original, as compared with "threadbare" versions sold in the 1980s.