Trailing Arbutus
Avon (1916)

Trailing Arbutus by Avon (1916) is a classic floral from the house first released by them under the original name of The California Perfume Company, composed by founder David Hall McConnell himself, and later re-issued in 1979 to celebrate the brand's approaching centennial anniversary. The formula for Trailing Arbutus is actually on display at Hagley Digital Archives for anyone with perfuming skill wanting to try re-creating it with available modern replacements for many of the old materials it used. A basic composition, Trailing Arbutus contains notes of rosewood, hawthorn (called "aubepine" by Avon), orris, tolu, musk, and uses benzyl acetate for a bit of sweetness. Trailing Arbutus was made by a man who had up until that point made his fortunes selling mostly soliflore compositions he designed with a hobbyist chemist knowledge, after giving them away as gifts with his original door-to-door bookselling business. By 1916, The California Perfume Company had satellite offices in Europe, and was a few years away from launching the Avon Cosmetics arm of the company, as it had already been using the Avon name on a few grooming accessories sold.

McConnell had built his own lab and compounding factory in New Jersey, headquartered the company in New York City, and would in a few years hire perfumers to take over for him so he could focus on administration until his eventual retirement and death in 1937. McConnell also used CPC's success to purchase Goettling & Co., a German-founded perfume maker also based out of NYC, mostly for their more-advanced labs, material-sourcing, and compounding facilities, explaining why Trailing Arbutus was from a formula first dated in 1914 but oddly not used until 1916, with the source of materials being from Goettling & Co. While not an abstract perfume by any means, the more-complex formula and push towards more-abstract floral-bouquet subjects showed how CPC (and eventually Avon) would be able to respectably combat pricier established French perfumery in regards to sophistication. Smell-wise, Trailing Arbutus is still mostly a "less is more" exercise even with that purview, living in its powdery rosewood/hawthorn/orris trifecta, with a supporting vibrato of what smells like nitromusks under it all.

I've said before that Avon never could go fully toe-to-toe with brands like Chanel or Guerlain for sheer cost and abstraction of formula, so they instead focused on simple designs with good materials, making their profit on low overhead from not having rent to pay for store fronts, nor retail distribution, hourly payroll, or other costs that add to a mark-ups on the final price. Trailing Arbutus is perhaps the best earliest example of this, a blend of early synthetics and naturals, showing off a simple if somewhat French-emulating design, being a prim and proper floral perfume for the middle-income homemaker that was the "social selling" bread-and-butter of the company until more sellers made careers of driving between towns and going door-to-door like they would in the 1950's and 1960's. Cars weren't even a part of the general equation for most Americans in 1916 unless you could get a Ford Model T. My 1979 sample of Trailing Arbutus compared to deeper CPC vintage shows off more iris facets than the hawthorn or rosewood ones, but does so with ionones and a different, drier musk profile "adulterated" with a bit of oakmoss (oh no); it's also much easier to find than a century-plus aged original. Thumbs up

The 70's version, which I suppose was like the original, remindned me of the Chanel 5 imitations you can find everywhere today, or like Coty's L'Aimant. It was floral, powdery and very sweet. It was very old fashioned but not old lady as with Youth Dew. It was more girlish. The powdery quality was deep rather than gritty like with Ombre Rose.