The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

  * * *

  ‘If you smell it, it’s there,’ smiled the impeccably elegant Jacques Polge, Chanel’s in-house perfumer. I’d just written a piece on the Exclusives, a high-end range sold only in the Chanel boutiques. What had intrigued Mr Polge was that it had been, unusually, published in a contemporary art magazine. When he called up the PR department to ask who I might be, they couldn’t answer. But a friend of mine who worked at a rare-books shop where Polge had been a client for years spoke to him about me. That’s how I ended up with an invitation for tea. Monsieur Polge would probably have been more inclined to discuss another one of our common interests, early-20th-century French poetry, but never having met a perfumer before – and the Chanel perfumer, no less – I endeavoured to draw as much information as I could, though not very successfully. ‘If you smell it, it’s there’ was, frustratingly, all he conceded when I asked him whether there was such or such a material in one of his perfumes. I could have read his answer as a dismissal (‘Little lady, just enjoy the stuff and leave the rest to the specialists’). Or it could’ve been I was right but that his policy was never to disclose that type of information. I chose instead to interpret it as an invitation to trust my nose.

  But I don’t buy into the ‘it’s all subjective’ spiel. Sure, you can judge a painting based on whether you’d want it on your wall, a piece of clothing or a perfume based on whether you’d like to wear it. But just because you don’t want it in your life doesn’t make it bad. And it’s not entirely impossible to consider perfumes beyond their ‘like/don’t like’ Facebook status, which is to say, beyond their nature as consumer products.

  When I first started covering fashion shows, I went at it like a girly-girl, picking the outfits I’d wear if I could afford them (consumer credit meant I could, and I’m still paying off that debt). But I co-wrote the reviews with a seasoned fashion journalist and she taught me how to ask other questions than ‘Would I wear it?’ The same questions you could ask of a perfume (or an exhibition, or a movie, for that matter): what intent does it set out to fulfil? How does it achieve its effects? How is it situated within the perfumer’s body of work? How does it fit in with the history of the brand or its identity? How does it compare to the current season’s offerings? Does it bring something new? What relationship does it bear to the history of the field? Can any light be shed on it through other creative fields?

  These are objective questions and they can be answered objectively. We’re not always able to, sometimes because we don’t know enough, sometimes because the perfume doesn’t ask them. Clearly, this approach won’t answer queries like ‘Does this stuff need to go on my most-wanted list?’ But if at least a share of the art of perfumery is to be snatched away from the lacquered claws of the business-school Talibans it needs to be approached with something resembling art criticism: the more knowledge is collected, clarified and transmitted to the public, the more chances there are that at least part of that public won’t accept unoriginal products, thus encouraging the industry to trust the perfumers at least some of the time.

  When the whole blogging phenomenon started taking on proportions significant enough for the industry to notice, quite a few professionals were either dismissive or dismayed, and generally reluctant to acknowledge it, much less engage with it. Indie perfumers, on the other hand, were active participants in the scene from the outset for obvious reasons: they have no budget for PR and their products are mostly sold online.

  The most striking case is Andy Tauer’s. The self-taught Zurich perfumer started an online diary chronicling his creative process, dropped in to comment on other blogs, and sent their authors samples of his compositions. His talent, sweet disposition and openness endeared him to his public: unlike the stars working for big labs or Parisian niche houses, he was accessible through his blog and he was their discovery. Since then, Mr Tauer, a pure product of the online perfume culture, has been the poster boy of indie perfumery.

  But the indie boom via online buzz is not the only way in which the thriving internet perfume culture has changed its object. In fact, something in the very nature of perfume may have shifted over the past few years.

  Fragrance has always been a social medium. Though most people would say they wear it for themselves, it necessarily enters the social sphere since it is airborne, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant huffily remarked back in the 18th century: ‘Others are forced, willy-nilly, to participate in this pleasure. And this is why, being in contradiction with freedom, olfaction is less social than taste, where among many dishes or bottles a guest can choose one that he likes without others being forced to share the pleasure of it.’

  Yet apart from the occasional ‘You smell lovely’ or ‘Yuck, is there something dead in here?’ the social interactions produced by fragrances remain mostly unspoken. Except, that is, within the loosely knit network of tens of thousands of people who style themselves ‘perfumistas’ after the neologism ‘fashionista’, from the Spanish suffix for ‘partisan of’, as in Communist. (I’m not wild about the word and I loathe ‘perfumisto’: the suffix ‘-ista’ applies to both genders.)

  Fragrance generates community and this community is generating an ever-expanding volume of discourse. In fact, you could say the discourse on fragrance has been hijacked from its traditional owners, PR and marketing departments, beauty editors, trade journals … Each review or comment transforms the perception of a fragrance, its description and the story that surrounds it. Whether it is the lovingly nurtured brainchild of a perfumer or the Frankenscent pieced together by a harried team on a budget, perfume is no longer just liquid in a fancy bottle. No longer just a product packaged and advertised by a brand. No longer just the stuff you spray on before a date. Each atomizer has become a kind of wormhole to a parallel world bursting with words, feelings, stories and people who may know each other in real life, but most likely not. In a way, you could say that the critical and social discourse that now surrounds perfume enables perfume to exist more fully today than it ever has.

  * * *

  What is, after all, a fragrance in a bottle? The brainchild of a perfumer, who’s composed a song, a poem, a story out of smells. Thousands of people may buy it: at least, that’s what he hopes. It may become a standard like Chanel N°5: he hopes for that too. But as long as it stays in that bottle, perfume is nothing, just as a song is nothing until it is sung and heard. It must be borne by skin, carried by air, perceived by noses and, most importantly, processed by the minds of those who breathe it in. The story told by the perfumer blends with the ones we tell ourselves about it; with our feelings, our moods, our references, our understanding of it. Once it is released from the bottle, it becomes a new entity, unique despite having been poured into thousands of bottles. We make it ours, like a singer sings a song: we are the performers of our perfumes.

  22

  ‘Skank: derogatory term for a (usually younger) female, implying trashiness or tackiness, lower-class status, poor hygiene, flakiness, and a scrawny, pockmarked sort of ugliness. May also imply promiscuity, but not necessarily’ states the online Urban Dictionary.

  But for perfume lovers, ‘skank’ has taken on another meaning. We’re not talking white trash here: we’re talking about what stinks. And we mean it in the nicest possible way.

  Cumin: sweat. Jasmine: poop. Civet: ditto. Narcissus: horse dung. Mimosa: used nappies. Costus: dirty hair. Blackcurrant bud: cat pee. Honey: public urinals. Grapefruit: BO with a hint of rotten egg (it contains mercaptan, the sulphurous molecule used to scent the odourless natural gas so that we can detect a leak).

  It was my friend March Dodge of the Perfume Posse who gave the word ‘skank’ its new meaning for perfume aficionados in a post about, of all things, some of the most widely revered masterpieces of perfumery, in which she detected something she termed ‘the Guerlain Skank’, ‘a rump-grinding, head-shaking invitation to a booty call, no matter how politely the scent’s been dressed up at the opening.’

  No need to call in Dr Jel
linek and his theory about erotic materials: perfume lovers, scrambling to catch up on all the classics and on the new, weirder niche stuff, had figured it out all by themselves. The love of skank is one of the most intriguing manifestations of the community’s relational aesthetics dynamics. It isn’t only a convenient term for ‘somethin’ dirty in mah perfume’, as March says: it’s a standard by which perfumes are judged, but also by which perfume lovers position themselves. And it’s probably telling that the notion of skank originated in the hyper-hygienic USA.

  In France, everyone’s got at least one beloved family member who sported old-school scents, many of which featured the pungent animalic notes that have been edited out of contemporary commercial products: it is part of the Gallic cultural heritage. But when the American perfume aficion set out to explore the classics, especially in their vintage form, there was some dismay but also a challenge to prove one’s mettle by actually embracing the skank. Perfumers often say there are no stinks, only odours to explore. Perfume lovers take the same attitude, along with the touch of snobbery every hipster cultivates – the general public may turn up their noses at the whiffy stuff, but we know better. In the words of one of the Marquis de Sade’s libertines: ‘We love what no one else loves, and this adds to our pleasure.’

  This desire to push back one’s limits in order to experience new forms of pleasure is reminiscent of certain sexual scenarios, but I believe there’s something else at play in the impulse to sublimate our interest in smells into an aesthetic pursuit. Overcoming our aversion to stink through its incorporation into beautiful compositions could be a way of not renouncing our more primal instincts; of drawing the pleasures that Western civilization considers base, and that our education leads us to reject, into the life of the mind – hence the miles of words written on perfume by enthusiasts. Of course, not all of those words concern skank; very few, in fact. But our very obsession with scent does point towards a peculiar form of libidinal investment, which doesn’t mean we derive sexual pleasure from our scented pursuits, but that perfumes engage some deep-seated vital energy, the libido. Skank is just the ultimate expression of that drive; its tell-tale symptom.

  It also provides an excellent excuse for a well-educated group engaging in a refined, costly hobby to indulge in some cheerfully regressive pee-and-poop talk. Listen in to the chat. The most iconic perfumes in history are treated, literally, like crap. Roudnitska’s leathery, cumin-laden Eau d’Hermès smells like ‘Robert Mitchum’s jockstrap in Grace Kelly’s purse.’ Guerlain’s Jicky, ‘like the cat crapped in a lavender patch’. Shalimar has been said to evoke nappies (used, N°2). Joy? The adult version of the excrement. Mitsouko exudes the sour smell of unwashed old ladies. Bandit is redolent of old ashtrays and soiled female undergarments. My mother’s own Bal à Versailles also ranks high on skank: it has become the very epitome of ‘unwashed panties’ or, in the words of one Posse reader, ‘cat butt morphing into cured horse manure’. To which March the Skank Queen replies: ‘Maria is a true perfumatrix. She smells something that goes from cat butt to cured horse manure, and does she burst into tears? Run away screaming? Saw her arm off? Nope. She takes notes and waits for the drydown. My tiara’s off to you, Maria.’

  As for myself, I’m not averse to a bit of skank, but then, I’m the type who sniffs her lovers greedily and turns around to take in the wake of attractive strangers. A little blast of eau d’humanité never hurt. I’m more put off by fragrances bleached of anything that could smell remotely gamey, the anorexic juices that feel like they’ve gurgled fabric softener.

  My own entry in the unwashed panties category is the vintage version of Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1937 Shocking. ‘That Italian artist who makes dresses’, as Gabrielle Chanel sneeringly called her, introduced Surrealism into couture by collaborating with Salvador Dalí on some of her more outlandish models (lobster-adorned jackets, a shoe worn as a hat, another hat resembling a lamb cutlet, complete with frill). The hot-pink box that shrouded Shocking expressed the indecent intensity of desire sung by her Surrealist friends. The scent itself was as flamboyantly immodest as its namesake pink. The perfume bottle expert Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg (quoted by Richard Stamelman in Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin) calls it ‘the first sex perfume’. And it is. Imagine a Parisian woman who has just spent a night in the arms of her lover. It is too late in the morning for her to go home and change, too late even to take a shower. She hurriedly splashes on a rose and lily-of-the-valley fragrance, even dabs a touch of it on her silk briefs. When she comes home and slips out of her silken lingerie … She smells of Shocking.

  Shocking does reek of gousset, the small triangle of fabric sewn into the petite culotte. Its combination of rose, ambergris, honey, civet, musk and sandalwood is possibly the closest evocation of the female bouquet ever devised by classic perfumery, barely veiled by the green floral fig-leaf of a lily-of-the-valley and gardenia heart. One can only imagine the effluvia wafting up from Schiaparelli’s place Vendôme salon as the artist Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard ‘put scent on his beard until it trickled onto his torn shirt and the little dog in his arms’ or ‘Marie-Louise Bousquet, the witty hostess of one of the last Paris drawing-rooms, [pulled] up her skirts and drenched her petticoats with it,’ as the designer recounts in her autobiography, aptly entitled Shocking Life.

  Mainstream perfumery has veered as far away as possible from skank, with a few noted exceptions (the late Alexander McQueen’s now discontinued, cumin-laden Kingdom was a flop). Niche perfumers, however, have often explored the territory with such animalic blends as the infamous Muscs Koublaï Khan (‘unwashed Mongol warrior after six months on the saddle’) or L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Al Oudh (‘camel driver’s armpit’). But the Swiss indie perfumer Vero Kern definitely raised the bar with Onda, possibly one of the most challenging – and ultimately rewarding – compositions in that particular genre.

  Vero, a warm, rangy woman with expressive features and an exuberant laugh, came to perfumery after having worked for Swissair, converted into massage therapy and veered off into aromachology. She found out she loved the essences she worked with for their beauty even more than for their therapeutic properties, took a course at Cinquième Sens and launched her tiny house with Kiki, Rubj (pronounced ‘ruby’) and Onda. Vero’s perfumes have soul and, like souls, they’re full of sublime beauty and dirty secrets. Her Onda is about earth, flowers and flesh smeared in spicy honey. The honey and musk wrap the earthy notes of iris, patchouli, oak moss and vetiver in a human funk that makes you feel you’ve sunk your nose in the lustily worn and discarded garments of your lover – there is more than a hint of the petite culotte in there …

  Onda’s earthiness, in both the literal and figurative sense, points towards another area of skank: the zone on the olfactory map where overripe fruit, rotting flowers, decaying vegetation, mouldy earth and stagnant water conjure the miasma of similarly corrupted animal flesh. This reminder of the destiny of all living things – a memento mori like the skulls Flemish painters placed in their vanities – stirs more anxiety than the odd hint of whiffy briefs, uncouth armpits or lavatories. Perhaps because its vegetal origin makes it more inhuman: Nature swallowing us whole.

  ‘I put it on, OK, good enough, big swampy flower, and then … the decay goes … deeper? Sharper? Wiggly? Something happens to make the swamp sweeter and more smothering in a way that I find vaguely panic-inducing,’ commented a Posse reader about a fragrance that has gained cult status, Sandrine Videault’s Manoumalia for Les Nez.

  Sandrine Videault, who was taught by the great Edmond Roudnitska, has always straddled the frontier between art and perfumery. She has done very few commercial fragrances, but has collaborated with artists like Fabrice Hybert and Hervé di Rosa in olfactory installations and authored several of her own, most notably at the 2000 FIAC (the French International Contemporary Art Fair); she is also an olfactory archaeologist of sorts, who re-created the ancient Egyptian kyphi for the Cairo Museum. She also stands apart from the ind
ustry geographically since she has settled in her native New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. This was the springboard for the first ethnographic perfume, based on the rituals of the islands of Wallis and Futuna, in a move reminiscent of the Cubists when they reached for African art as the means to break down the codes of figuration. Built around a reconstitution of the fagraea flower which grows on the ‘Taboo tree’, Manoumalia reprises the notes of Wallisian rituals: fagraea, sandalwood powder, vetiver, and an old French perfume Wallisians are so fond of they often wash their hands in it, L.T. Piver’s Pompeia. The result is both suave and strange: a creamy tuberose-frangipani-gardenia accord ripe with mushroom and gasoline notes on a bitter, leathery vetiver base and a buttery trail of sandalwood; the offspring of Bandit and Fracas gone native.

  Manoumalia is a sophisticated composition yet it is also so primal that it elicits amazingly violent reactions. Rubber, drain cleaner, faecal matter, rancid butter, cheese, mothballs, formaldehyde, urinal cakes, ashtray, rotting animals and even the ‘sweetish, faintly bloody and meaty’ smell of afterbirth … There isn’t an evil stench Manoumalia hasn’t been compared to. But as an online commenter points out, these amazingly negative reactions are actually a testimony to its stunning realism: ‘I am always struck by the rotting, faecal, vegetal, death/birth/death/ birth smell of the tropics. I think it’s because they are touted in the media as being sweet and charming/flowery when in fact they are savage and terrifying in their desire to regenerate.’

  ‘Manoumalia stirs up passions and that seems positive to me,’ Sandrine told me in an email after reading these comments. ‘All the associations are either accurate or justified … Sleeping with tuberoses or fagraeas by your bed can be unbearable because they are so powerful and can unfold faecal or rotten facets. Those unpleasant facets are not olfactory hallucinations … The point is to get back to the form of the fragrance rather than staying stuck on facets. All of this depends on our state of mind, or even the state our soul is in at the moment of olfaction.’