by Mandy Aftel
Hazardous side effects notwithstanding, cultures the world over continue to pursue the power of scent to kindle desire, especially in women. In the highlands of New Guinea, shamans say incantations over ginger leaves, which are thought to lend allure to the man who rubs them on his face and body. In the Amazon, Yanomamö men carry sachets of fragrant powders that are supposed to make attractive women tumble into their arms. Over the years, printed perfume advertisements have played upon the fact that we are no different from such peoples in our belief that fragrance can seduce. For all the slick advertising and fancy packaging, what we hold fast to is our belief in the power of matter itself to create celestial passion, or at least to wreak divine havoc.
There was a young lady named Julie,
Who was terribly fond of patchouli;
She used bottles seven,
’Til she smelt up to heaven,
Which made all the angels unruly.
—Ethel Watts Mumford
The conviction that some sort of erotic “magic bullet” exists or can be created in the realm of scent is not without some scientific basis. The perception of pheromones plays a key role in animal mating habits. Pheromones—from the Greek pherin, “to transfer,” and hormon, “to excite”—are chemical substances, usually volatile, that are produced in the body and evoke a response, usually sexual, in members of the same species. Like scent itself, pheromones are apprehended directly and immediately by the nervous system, triggering biological responses even before they enter consciousness. Their pathway to the brain appears to be through the airways of the nose and the vomeronasal organ (VNO), a version of the sensory organ upon which all cat species, among others, depend for information about their environment. In humans it is vestigial, consisting of two tiny pits behind the nostrils, and there is debate as to whether it remains functional, since pheromone perception has been found in people from whom it has been surgically removed.
However it happens, pheromone perception is what causes a lion to mate with another lion and not with a giraffe. As Roy Bedichek observes, “Death and destruction103 hold no terrors” for an animal under the spell of these “natural aphrodisiacs.” Even plants have a sexuality based on fragrance.
The vegetable world104 is pluming and perfuming itself for erotic gratification. Flowering plants are loosing urgent invitations: “Come, come right now before it is too late,” they plead, flinging their odor-burdened molecules upon the wind. Bees, butterflies, dozens of different species, even a few birds, responding, scurry from bloom to accosting bloom, giving or receiving a dab of pollen in exchange for a dip into carefully guarded nectar sacs.
In nature it’s a simple cycle: sensory stimulus leads to attraction which leads to seduction. And humans participate in this cycle, communicating their desires in the wordless dialogue Herman Hesse so eloquently captured in Narcissus and Goldmund: “How strange it was105 with women and loving. There really was no need for words … Then how had she said it? With her eyes, yes, and with a certain intonation in her slightly thick voice, and with something more, a scent perhaps, a subtle, discreet emanation of the skin, by which women and men were able to know at once when they desired one another. It was strange, like a subtle, secret language.”
The discovery that pheromones could be chemically replicated excited great commercial interest in them. Not surprisingly, some of the scientists who discovered pheromones became involved in marketing perfumes based on synthesized versions. Meanwhile, perfumers continue to look for new ways of exploiting the aphrodisiac properties of specific scents, especially the indol-saturated flower absolutes, such as jasmine, orange flower, boronia, and tuberose. Yet rose, which is one of the most voluptuous essences, does not contain indol, and neither do ambrette, costus, labdanum, tolu balsam, castoreum, or civet—the balsamic earthy and animal base notes that are perhaps the sexiest scents of all. Do they contain some other magic ingredient? Or does the whole notion of magic ingredients somehow miss the point?
The primal, almost off-putting earthiness of the erotogenic base notes points to a little-acknowledged truth about the relationship of scent to sexuality: sexy smells are subliminally reminiscent of the smell of sweat and of the hairy regions of the human body. The odor of our species at its most animal is at the heart of eros.
Human beings were not always so uncomfortable with this truth. In ancient Egypt, notes Iwan Bloch106 in Odoratus Sexualis, his peculiar, obsessive 1934 scientific and cultural catalog of sexual scents and erotic perfumes, both men and women perfumed their genitalia, not to mask their odors but to enhance and even to exaggerate them. Women rolled the unguent kyphi into little balls and placed them in the vulva. He cites the Renaissance physician Prospero Albini, who spent three years in Egypt studying medicine, as observing, “The Egyptian women anoint the vulva with amber and civet, thus increasing the pleasure of coitus. Just as the women of Italy and other nations pay great attention to the care of their face and hair so do the Egyptian women, neglecting entirely the interests of their European sisters, pay exclusive attention to the pudenda and the regions thereunto adjacent.”
The Hindus, Bloch claims, were equally preoccupied with the odor of the female genitals, and used it to classify women into four distinct types:
The lotus smelling: Their two breasts are like the bilva fruit. They are distinguished by the fact that the love secretion flows without cessation and can be compared to the odor of the Tamarei, which has lovely blossoms. Their sexual organ is like the flower of the red water-rose, and is compared to a holy mystery.
The merry: Their breasts are thick, and their thighs have the color of gold. Their love secretion has an odor like that of honey or the sap of the palm tree. Their sexual part is beautiful because it possesses a copious foliage of hair. Their love-secretion is mild and flows abundantly for their sexual organ is drawn apart as with a pulley.
The snail-like: They are very thin and meager. They have long black hair on their sexual organ which is compressed; hence their love secretion tastes and smells salty.
The elephant-like: Their body is large and rich. Their vulva is exceedingly broad because the dry and protruding Mani (Clitoris, the middle pearl of the rose-wreath) stands therein. Their love secretion has the penetrating odor of the fluid which is discharged from the ear of the rutting elephant.
The use of body odor as an aphrodisiac is recorded in the ancient literature of nearly all languages. Garments impregnated with a would-be lover’s perspiration were smuggled into the proximity of the desired sexual partner, and sweat also played an important role in the preparation of elixirs. During Shakespeare’s time, a woman in love would place a peeled apple in her armpit to saturate it with her scent and then present it to her beloved as a token of her desire. Napoleon famously sent advance word to Josephine, “I will be arriving in Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.” And Walt Whitman, celebrant of earthy delights, called sweat an “aroma finer than prayer.”
Still, a streak of evasiveness, if not ambivalence, runs through the record of our fascination with the way the body smells. The Greeks were fascinated with the panther, which they believed to have exceptionally sweet breath and a lovely body odor. Aristotle and several others described its hunting techniques: it would hide and, like a courtesan, allow its natural fragrance to enchant its victims, drawing them ever nearer until the panther pounced on them and killed them. But the panther is not only deadly; among creatures of nature it is also seen as exceptional in its pleasant scent.
“When she opens her red lips, her breath fills all of Tientsin with perfume,” goes a Chinese love poem. “I send thee sweet perfume, ministering to scent with scent,” writes the Roman epigrammatist Martial. But how does the beloved’s enticing perfume actually smell? Often the focus of the sentiment is diverted from scent altogether, following the displacement of the olfactory by the visual that is humans’ evolutionary lot. The beloved was as lovely as a flower, never mind what she smelled like.
It took a poet of Baudelaire’s d
aring and genius to write about erotic scent in an entirely frank way. He reminded the world that women smelled like a lot of things, good and bad. And it wasn’t their perfume per se that was a turn-on. It was the smell of the body beneath the perfume—the base note under the base note. With Baudelaire, observes the French social historian Alain Corbin in The Foul and the Fragrant, “The scented profile107 of the woman was transformed.”
She was no longer delineated beneath filmy gauze. The perfume of bare flesh, intensified by the warmth and moistness of the bed, replaced the veiled scents of the modest body as a sexual stimulus. The visual metaphor died out. The woman stopped being a lily; she became a perfume sachet, a bouquet of odors that emanated from the “odorous wood” of her unbound hair, skin, breath, and blood. The woman’s perfume set the seal on the erotic intimacy of the chamber and the bed. She was the “censer” in the alcove, exhaling a whole cluster of scents—the negative equivalents of which were stale tobacco and, even more, the musty odor of rooms, which attested to her absence. The emanations of the flesh gave life to the home and made it the theater of ceaselessly clashing smells. The atmosphere of the alcove generated desire and unleashed storms of passion.
After Baudelaire, the scent of the body could be celebrated for itself, inferior to nothing else in nature and, from the lover’s standpoint, the sine qua non of all the rest. As Rainer Maria Rilke would write:
You feel how external fragrance stands
Upon your stronger resistance?
There is no question that typically unmentionable bodily smells are the bedrock of olfactory arousal. With characteristically unflinching candor, Havelock Ellis108 classified these odors in increasing order of erotogenic effect: “The most important of these are: (1) the general skin odor, a faint, but agreeable, fragrance often detected on the skin even immediately after washing; (2) the smell of the hair and scalp; (3) the odor of breath; (4) the odor of the armpit; (5) the odor of the foot; (6) the perineal odor; (7) in men, the odor of preputial smegma; (8) in women, the odor of the mons veneris, that of vulvar smegma, that of vaginal mucus, and menstrual odor.” A penchant for the last two, Ellis scandalously suggested, could be why some people are more inclined to giving oral sex.
No one brought this idea better to light than Henry Miller, who dared to break the code of silence about what Baudelaire called “the muskiness of fur”—that is, the seductive smell of a woman’s genitals. “With the refinements109 that come from maturity the smells [of childhood] faded out, to be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell—the odor of the cunt. More particularly the odor that lingers on the fingers after playing with a woman, for if it has not been noticed before, this smell is more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carries the perfume of the past tense, than the odor of the cunt itself.”
Nor does our fascination stop there. A further reminder of our animal nature is our eternal interest in feces and its scented connection to sexuality. An unsent letter from Benjamin Franklin to the Royal Academy of Brussels, proposing an attempt to “discover some Drug110, wholesome and not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that shall render the natural discharges of Wind from our Bodies not only inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes,” displays the mixture of attraction and repulsion—and hilarity—that fecal odors inspire.
Let it be considered of how small importance to Mankind, or to how small a Part of Mankind have been useful those Discoveries in Science that have heretofore made Philosophers famous. Are there twenty men happier, or even the easier for any knowledge they have pick’d out of Aristotle? What comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to man who has Whirlwinds in his Bowels! … The Pleasure arising to a few Philosophers, from seeing, a few times in their lives, the threads of light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven colors, can it be compared with the ease and comfort every man living might feel seven times a day, by discharging freely the wind from his Bowels? Especially if it be converted into a Perfume …
But it is truly the fecal essence of our most pungent bodily odors that draws us, even as it repels us. The precarious balance between arousal and disgust is sexual in its very nature, creating erotic tension and heightening arousal. It manifests itself in the pervasiveness of scatological references in folklore, superstition, and literature, and in the universality of coprolagnia—sexual practices that link human excretion with eroticism.
The intensely earthy scents of the body that trigger libido are not, however, erotic in themselves, any more than the blatant, unmodulated come-on of a “sexy” synthetic blend is. Scent can be sexual without being erotic. In our sexuality, we are purely in the domain of nature; in our eroticism, we are specifically human. As Paul Jellinek puts it, “Sexuality is the totality111 of characteristics and reaction patterns through which the sexual nature of the individual manifests itself. It is the biological link between the individual and the community, and links the biological interests of the individual (self-preservation) with those of the species (procreation). Eroticism, which in a larger sense includes the entire universe of bodily and spiritual sexual experience, is here taken to mean the sensual and spiritual love life, in contrast to sexuality which in the sense of the procreation drive aims at the bodily coupling of the sexes.”
While lust can be easily triggered, eroticism is subtle, complex, and, above all, dependent on context. Eroticism, like perfume itself, is a constructed reality. Women do not want to smell like a flower; they want their perfume to radiate an aura that is sexually alluring. So a truly aphrodisiac perfume is one that triggers our unconscious memory of our animal nature in all its erotic manifestations. It is neither a return to our animal nature nor an attempt to cover it up, but rather an exalting of it. And it celebrates not the lowest-common-denominator sexual response that we have in common with other creatures but the individual’s unique sexuality—what Rilke spoke of when he referred to one’s ability to achieve “out of your own experience112 and childhood and strength … a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom).”
The body has a scent as singular as a face. H. G. Wells, not a particularly handsome man, was a notorious womanizer. Was it his great mind, his literary talent, or his celebrity that drew so many women to him? No, a former lover confessed, it was the scent of his skin; he smelled of honey. Even the same body smells different from time to time, its complex odors varying with health, diet, emotion, and age. An erotic perfume mingles with the body’s distinctive smell, heightening and enhancing it rather than masking it, just as sexy lingerie accentuates rather than conceals the contours of the body. It cannot be traced to any specific odor, but it is an artful construction of scents based on the impolite smells of the human body.
As befits a zoologist113, Michael Stoddart, a pioneer in researching mammalian olfactive biology, neatly sums up the components of perfume as follows: the sexual secretions of flowers, “produced to attract animals for the purpose of cross pollination and often formulated as mimics of the animals’ own sex pheromones,” many of which “contain compounds with a fecal odor”; “resinous materials which have odors not unlike those of sex steroids”; and “mammalian sex attractants with a distinctly urinous or fecal odor,” which “accentuate the wearer’s odorous qualities in the same way that well-cut clothes accentuate the wearer’s frame. In offering to the perceiver a cocktail of sex attractant odors at a low concentration in the base notes they subconsciously reveal what consciously the strident top notes seek to hide. The perceiver’s attention is drawn to the more volatile and active … notes much as one is drawn to a newspaper by its headlines. The real message is carried in the small print.”
Yet this formula does not fully account for the power of context, which is the ultimate aphrodisiac. It is true that certain perfume essences are more flagrantly seductive than others. But ultimately it is the way the essences interact with one another and with one’s own body chemistry that make the blend erotic (or not) on
a given wearer. What is voluptuous in one blend (or on one person) can turn earthy or fresh in another. Where scent and sex are concerned, context is everything, as Paul Jellinek demonstrated in a fascinating experiment.114
Jellinek began with two blends: Quelques Fleurs, the century-old, intensely floral composition filled with rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, tuberose, orris, ylang ylang, neroli, and other flowers. The other fragrance was a conventional eau de cologne made from citrus oils, with rose and neroli and an accent of rosemary. Then he added various essences to the blends, asking participants to judge after each addition whether it made the fragrance more or less erotic in its effect. When he increased the amount of neroli, the samplers reported diametrically opposite effects. In the eau de cologne, it was the “most sultry, least volatile component of the entire odorant blend,” and therefore was judged to be erotic. In Quelques Fleurs, however, the neroli joined with the citrus oils, like bergamot and lemon, as a top note, balancing the deeply floral heart. Because of its relative freshness, it was perceived as antierogenous. Sexuality in scent is complicated, driven by context rather than by simple formulas. And the eroticism it can engender, like all eroticism, is complex, delicate, and the result of many factors—not all of which can be measured or even named.
Gathering jasmine in Provence
The particularity of a lover’s scent is a wellspring of eroticism. Its remembrance keeps passion alive even as it fills the soul with regret for the passage of time. Paolo Rovesti recollects115 a deceased colleague who “was an olfactive like few others.”