Facilitating heterosexual seduction, romance, and love was twentieth-century perfume’s raison d’etre, if perfume advertisements from the past are any indication. Evening in Paris, Intimate, and Ambush, for example, were all promised as aids to heterosexual union, each one offering feminine elixirs that could lure and trap men for romance. From their cartoonish pop packaging, campiness, and pervy/queer sensibility, État Libre d’Orange shifted perfumery from this old-school, aspirational, heterosexual matrix onto a countercultural, explicitly queer one. And although its website copy suggests that the sex represented in Sécrétions Magnifiques is missionary style, its acronym refers to sex that combines violence with tenderness, and shifts us from the twentieth-century perfume ethos of heterosexual romance and gender conformity to a kind of no-limits queer space.
Notes for Sécrétions Magnifiques: Iodized accord (fucus [seaweed], Azurone), adrenaline accord, blood accord, milk accord, iris, coconut, sandalwood, opopanax (known as sweet myrrh)
In a phone interview, Lie told me the thinking behind all of Sécrétions Magnifiques’s notes.
“Because your blood pumps quicker when you’re excited,” Lie explained, “there was the blood accord.” Adrenaline, which doesn’t have a smell, was something he translated into perfume notes. He wanted to create an accord that was energizing, so he created an accord with a lime and grapefruit effect, “with a touch of sulfur,” he adds, bitter and slightly metallic. Next up, the molecule Azurone, for its saliva aspect. “There’s an overdose of Azurone in Sécrétions Magnifiques,” he says. “It’s usually a part per million dilution, but I used it without dilution at all. It plays the role of something wet, animalic, sweaty. It smells a bit like saliva when you lick your skin and then smell it. It might not be that pleasant for a fragrance, but for this fragrance, it was good. It was perfect.”
To make the scent smell a bit more pleasant, he added a milky accord, which also references, even if in a token suggestion, feminine body fluids.
“When I mixed up the four accords—sweat, sperm, saliva, and blood—it was very difficult. Sharp. Very metallic/animalic. I needed to wrap it in something pleasant and sensual, but also something that would make it easier. I added this milky accord, and since milk is also a fluid from the female body, it was perfect; it was coherent with this story.”
Lie says that although he has a molecule that smells uncannily of sperm, he was adamant with de Swardt that he did not want the perfume to smell overwhelmingly sperm-like. I gingerly asked him, “But Sécrétions Magnifiques still kinda smells like sperm, right?” He laughs. “Yes, it’s kind of there. You have a feeling of it because you’ve got elements that are salty and slightly mushroomy, but I did not include the molecule that really smells like sperm. For some people, Sécrétions Magnifiques is very sperm-like, and some don’t smell it at all. So that’s the beauty of it … because it still means that at the moment of the ejaculation, it’s there; it’s just not quite in your face, you know!”
To understand the scents that Lie creates now, like Comme des Garçon’s Eau de Parfum, with its brown Scotch tape and glue accords, and Blood Concept’s RED+MA, a scent inspired by milk and blood, it’s important to see the milieu Lie emerged from. He came of age in perfumery during the regime of clean. From 1993 to 1999, he moved to the United States and worked as a perfumer in what he called a new generation of fragrance. “I was in the new clean, very transparent, American school at the time,” he says. “Fragrance was not here to disturb but to make you feel clean.”
In addition to the clean style of perfumery in the 1990s, there was a big shift between the classical, artisanal fragrance industry to a more-international industry, in which perfume-by-committee became the norm. “Suddenly, we went from a situation where perfumes were developed only by a few people—from one perfumer with the guy who decides to put the fragrance in a bottle—to suddenly a team of marketing developers and fragrance testers. More people were involved, and suddenly everybody was providing input. And because so many people were involved, perfume lacked personality and daring.” He says that after about ten years of working in this environment, he got bored.
After my conversation with Lie, it occurs to me that there is something neither of us discussed, but that adds another layer to Sécrétions Magnifiques’s subversiveness. De Swardt and Lie’s creation deviated from the School of Clean, but it didn’t abandon it altogether. The brilliant irony is, Sécrétions Magnifiques is a fresh, marine fragrance, but in a radically different way than the watermelon-y and ozonic Cool Water and L’Eau d’Issey are fresh marine scents. After all, bodily fluids captured at the moment of / right before their emission could be described as fresh. And Sécrétions Magnifiques’s Azurone accord, which has a seaweed aspect, is certainly an element of the sea, and surely accounts in part for what Luca Turin described as its “bilge” note. In addition, its milky/marine accords also archly reference female bodily fluids. Women’s bodily scents have long been linked misogynistically with “fishy” smells, but Sécrétions Magnifiques’s evocation of the feminine body—in however an attenuated form compared to its masculine bent—seems to cleave more closely to the olfactory version of writer Jeanette Winterson’s poetic paean to women’s bodily smells, in Written on the Body: “She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child …”
So what does Sécrétions Magnifiques actually smell like? Sniffing it has become an initiation rite for every self-described perfumista, and there’s even a genre of YouTube videos depicting sniffers’ “first time” with the scent. (The video of Katie Puckrik’s “first time” with Sécrétions Magnifiques is practically required viewing!) Although it often elicits exclamations of disapproval to downright revulsion (a friend of mine—true story—got a migraine after sniffing it and promptly went home and vomited), it also inspires curiosity and a begrudging admiration, if not outright devotion.
Sécrétions Magnifiques starts out like a dreamy, soft floral, but soon (cue the Psycho soundtrack), the perfume begins to take a decidedly biological turn. A metallic blood accord with a lightly marine smell combines with what soon becomes a milky (to my nose), overly sweet drydown whose unnerving longevity on skin is like no other perfume I’ve ever smelled. Scrub it off if you will, Sécrétions Magnifiques does not come off until it wants to. I’ve had people confirm my experience—that trying to wash it off made it even stronger!
Sécrétions Magnifiques is also a complex olfactory representation of bodies and sex. The website copy says in purple prose that it’s “an ode to the pinnacle of sexual pleasure …,” but initially, its scent evokes male pleasure. Sécrétions Magnifiques smells, to put it bluntly, like fresh ejaculate. But it also smells like the scents of sex, providing an almost-olfactory montage of a sex scene: first, the smell of mouths on mouths and other body parts, the scent of saliva, skin, and even excitement represented by the adrenaline accord. Although the blood and adrenaline accord are representative of fluids inside our body, they also represent the smells of violence and accidents. Freud likened our sex drives to the death drive. Sécrétions Magnifiques meditates on this in the olfactory realm. It folds the violence of its sexual referents into its acronym, SM, sadomasochism. And it folds olfactory metaphors of death, like blood and decay, into its more-ordinary perfume notes. Love it or hate it, Sécretions Magnifiques is a perfume masterpiece.
I recently came across notes I took in 2008 after smelling Sécrétions Magnifiques for the first time, shortly after I began my foray into perfume. I never meant for anyone to read them, and I was embarrassed to write my true impressions, which seemed shocking even to me. However, in hindsight, these notes seem like a more-accurate description of Sécrétions Magnifiques than the politer, more-censored versions I’ve come up with over the years. So to stay true to the perfume’s daring, I’m going to take a risk; here are my notes in their entirety, unedited.
The tang of metal or blood with an incongruous and dirty, funky floral tinged with salt. I may end up liking this later
, but for now, I find it revolting and ill-mannered, like a good-looking, good-smelling guy who just shot a wad in my face without warning. Truly one of the most bizarre smells ever. Funk. Spunk. Spit. Sweat. Not musky sweat, but rather sweet-sour, fresh, metallic sweat. And that leering floral! This perfume is leering at me. Someone please make it stop. This is one of the louchest things I think I’ve ever encountered in perfume form. And it keeps rising up in a waft to insult me. The scent doesn’t unfold like a regular perfume. It has the quality of compulsion. It won’t go away. It forces itself on you. This ill-mannered thing is swirling high in a milky plane of sweat, a register unfamiliar to my everyday polite nose, but well-familiar in the bedroom. The scent manages to mimic (how does one write about this without being dirty?!), in its longevity, the staying power of semen in your mouth. That tenacious, bleach-flavored mucous that seems as if it will never go away. A truly obscene, bodily fragrance. My nose just lost its virginity.
Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume: Mixing Memory with Desire
There’s a magic trick I like to play when I’m introducing people to perfume, and it involves pulling out CB I Hate Perfume’s Soaked Earth, an uncanny rendition not only of the smells of dirt—mineral elements, stones, twigs, water—but also the emotion embedded in the memories of that smell. No one is indifferent to this scent, so powerfully does it pull you into the memory experience we all have of what the ground smells like after rain.
One day, walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans after a huge rainstorm, I found myself smiling and thinking, “This smells just like Soaked Earth.” The Simulacrum, just as postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard had predicted, had superseded the Real. A century after perfume styles shifted from representational, one-note florals to abstract perfumes that seemed more modern, Christopher Brosius and his perfume line CB I Hate Perfume returns to a naturalistic ethos—but with a twist. Nature is not a privileged olfactory obsession; it is but one referent among many.
“Every perfumer has a unique … vocabulary; mine is based on Reality.”
—CHRISTOPHER BROSIUS
For Christopher Brosius, the world’s smells are already their own perfume. In 1993, after a stint at Kiehl’s as a perfumer, Brosius started his own perfume brand, Demeter, where he created an extraordinary scent library: a collection of scents that smelled like things in the world, from Dust, Vinyl, Playdough, and Paperback books, to Snow. The latter, an uncanny olfactory representation of snow and its effect—its coldness rendered with a touch of mint, and a bit of earth representing what’s beneath—garnered him a FiFi award for Best Fragrance of 2000.
After Brosius left Demeter in 2004 and created his niche line, CB I Hate Perfume, he retweaked and renamed some of his classics from Demeter, making explicit what was only implicit in Demeter: Christopher Brosius hates perfume, or, to be specific, commercial perfume—its synthetic musks, and its encouragement of people to smell like everyone else. His online manifesto is nothing if not emphatic about what he hates about perfume. In some perfumers’ hands, perfume becomes “an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same unnatural shape,” or “An opaque shell concealing everything—revealing nothing.” And if you can’t be shamed into buying niche over mass-market perfume, perhaps my favorite Christopher Brosius quote will change your mind: “People who smell like everyone else disgust me.”
Like an olfactory found-objects artist, Brosius reminds us that there is an enchanted forest of scents right under our noses. His love for the world’s scents is democratic: Floral accords and scents traditionally considered beautiful exist alongside scents that smell like dirt, bubble gum, paperback books, roast beef, an old fur coat (with its stale smells and hints of faded, vintage perfume), and even plastic doll heads. All of these and more are offerings at his CB I Hate Perfume scent gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The eccentric scents can be charmingly specific. Brosius doesn’t just have a scent that smells like mittens, for example, but rather, wet mittens. There are even two versions of the scent of gum: chewing gum and Bazooka bubble gum, the 1974 edition!
His scents are both fully realized perfumes—like the one he made to honor actor Alan Cumming—and what he calls “premium accords.” In evocative categories such as Archetype Series, Experience, and Secret History, they blend realism and a novel, explicitly autobiographical approach to perfume. Smelling his perfume Walking in the Air, for example, is to understand that one is smelling a particular person’s reconstruction of a memory, complete, as his website puts it, with “a Field of Untouched New Fallen Snow [one of his accords], handknit woolen mittens covered with frost, a hint of frozen forest and sleeping earth.” In Greenbriar 1968, he tells us, “This scent is a memory of my Grandfather, the sawmill that he owned and the stone house where he lived. It is blended with Sawdust, Fresh Cut Hay, Worn Leather Work Gloves, Pipe Tobacco and a healthy amount of Dirt. There is also a faint whiff of cotton overalls covered in Axle Grease …”
If the world as we know it were going to end, like the sci-fi Paris of Chris Marker’s short film, La Jetée, I hope that in our underground bunkers, someone will have a stash of CB I Hate Perfume’s scents to remind us of how our lost world once smelled.
Sissel Tolaas: Scent as Communication and Information
What does a neighborhood, a city, or fear smell like? What does it mean that there are olfactory puns in the world—that a dirty foot can smell like fancy cheese; cat urine, like black currant buds; or body odor, like cumin? For Sissel Tolaas, beginning to ask Westerners who are obsessed with covering up body odors and often fearful of any smells at all to begin thinking about these questions could have personal and political ramifications we cannot foresee. Whether she’s gathering scents representative of cities, collecting the sweat of men with anxiety disorder, or taking bacteria from human sweat and turning it into cheese, Tolaas’s goal is to expand our awareness of smell—to understand how it communicates with us, and how we communicate with each other through smell. She also wants us to see the way in which smell can create prejudice or be a tool in helping us open up to each other.
But none of it can happen until we educate our noses and explore.
In the late 1980s, Sissel Tolaas, who was born in Norway and now lives and works in Berlin, became curious about smell. This polymath—trained in science, art, and languages—realized that not too many people were working in this realm, so she began to train her nose by going out into the world to gather anything she could that caught her fancy, preserving scraps of found objects in sealed, labeled cans for later study.
Among the items in her “smell archive,” which has surely exceeded the 7,000-plus number of objects last recorded in 2008, Tolaas has pieces of stinky dried fish, forty different varieties of stinky socks, and hundreds of samples of dog feces. Tolaas, in other words, takes the dictum that one should “stop and smell the roses” to a whole new level. If Christopher Brosius thinks that the world is already its own perfume, self-described “professional provocateur” Sissel Tolaas takes that one step further by refusing to require that something smells “good” for her to be interested in it. In the West, smell is thought of in aesthetic terms: It smells “good” or it smells “bad.” But Tolaas recognizes that in other cultures, scent is also communication and information, and her work seeks to reopen our connection to scent’s other dimensions and purposes.
Since 2004, Tolaas has worked with the commercial research institution International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), the biggest provider of smells and taste molecules in the world. In exchange for doing conceptual research for them, with clients including IKEA and Adidas, IFF finances her office in Berlin and her use of headspace technology, an expensive process whereby scent molecules are captured, analyzed, and stored for later analysis or to use as a blueprint for reproducing the scent.
Traditionally, headspace technology has been used in perfumery to capture scent molecules from flowers resistant to giving up their fragrance by traditional perfumery methods—like lily of the valley,
gardenia, and certain orchids. It’s also allowed perfumers like Christopher Brosius to have a starting point for perfumes that smell like books and leather, scented objects whose smells could not be captured by other means.
Tolaas thinks that Westerners are “smell-blinded,” disconnected from our most intimate sense and encouraged to cover our own smells with deodorant and scented products. What her projects all have in common is to remove smell from its original context so that we might think about it without prejudice, or at least with the acknowledgment that we have a filter around what we smell and how we’re reacting to it. All of her noncommercial projects work toward this end, to expand our senses of smell in the hopes that we will create a better world and be more tolerant of one another. This might sound like a tall order for stinky socks, but you might rethink their power after reading some of her fascinating projects.
In 2006, MIT commissioned Tolaas to do a project with a new microencapsulation technology. At the time, there was still a discourse in the United States around terror, fear, and paranoia. She was curious about whether or not fear could be smelled by people, so she found a group of men around the world with panic disorder who agreed to collect their sweat during panic attacks and overnight the collection to her, so she could reproduce those scent molecules. The molecules were then microencapsulated into paint and applied to walls. One night in 2006, at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, an art gallery full of blank walls introduced Tolaas’s “The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR” exhibit.
For Tolaas, paint served as a metaphor for skin. When a visitor approached one part of the wall, touching it, it would break open the capsules, releasing the scent of one of the twelve panicky men. Some visitors, knowing what was in store for them, refused to enter the gallery, or refused to touch the walls. Others, released from the original context of the smell (a phobic man’s armpit!), were able to approach the scents with curiosity and wonder. One woman became enamored of Guy No. 9, whose sweat was particularly pungent, and was seen visiting his scent every day until the exhibit ended.
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