And this may well be what lies at the core of the powerful feeling of repulsion the insanely beautiful Manoumalia induces in some wearers: the obscenity of flowers exposed as perhaps never before; a trail of damp, red-in-tooth-and-claw tropical nature that could send you off muttering, ‘The horror, the horror’, Apocalypse Now-style … What Manoumalia conjures is an olfactory archetype, and one that speaks deeply to us. But the emotional tenor of those reactions is cultural: what triggers anxiety in Americans causes Wallis Islanders to break out in a huge grin; it can make a sixty-year-old biochemist from Southern India gush with tears in his eyes that he’s been looking to capture that smell all his life … It is precisely because Manoumalia was born of a quest to renew the vocabulary of Western perfumery that it includes odours that would have been sandblasted out of a more commercial product.
The need to avoid overtly unpleasant notes marks the limits of perfume as a contemporary art form. There is, however, one notable exception: Sécrétions Magnifiques, conceived by the maverick niche house État Libre d’Orange for its shock value. The scent is based on the smells of blood, saliva, semen, sweat and maternal milk. They are designated as such in the notes list, with an ejaculating penis as a visual to drive the point home.
Playful provocation is part of État Libre d’Orange’s DNA. Their products bear names like Putain des Palaces (‘Fancy hotel whore’, a tribute to a song by Serge Gainsbourg), Charogne (‘Carrion’) or Don’t Get Me Wrong Baby, I Don’t Swallow. Some of their visuals are correspondingly graphic. Both overtly display what the perfume industry has been selling itself on for decades: sex. But they throw something into the mix that the industry has never allowed itself to draw on: an iconoclastic sense of humour. By putting together irreverently clashing concepts such as jasmine and cigarettes or incense and bubblegum, the scents themselves often play on the Surrealistic process inspired by a quote from the French poet Lautréamont: ‘the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table’.
But none are as deliberately shocking as Sécrétions Magnifiques, which has achieved such iconic status among perfume connoisseurs that it is the benchmark against which everything gagworthy is gauged, including by people who haven’t actually smelled it. The fragrance blogger Katie Puckrick has even put out a YouTube video where she applies it live as if it were a stunt – the perfume-world equivalent of the MTV reality show Jackass.
But why do skank aficionados who pride themselves on having overcome human-cumin-phobia and gloat at indole overdoses reach for sandpaper whenever a molecule of Sécrétions Magnifiques brushes their skin? All the notes it contains are notes they contain – many of which they’ve actually swallowed. True, Sécrétions Magnifiques is disconcerting with its odd metallic and iodic notes, but not quite as literal as the visual implies. Could it be that identifying its notes as blood, sperm, maternal milk and so forth, rather than saying ‘metallic’, ‘marine’ or ‘creamy’, is what triggers such exaggerated reactions? In the London niche perfumery shop Les Senteurs, the fragrance adviser dons a latex glove to spray a blotter, as though the scent literally contained the bodily fluids listed and therefore presented a medical hazard.
Sécrétions Magnifiques breaks the boundaries between the liquids we squirt on and the ones we squirt out, but its author Antoine Lie never envisioned it as a literal rendition of the smell of semen. In fact, that was a point on which he disagreed with the owner of État Libre d’Orange, Étienne de Swardt. Lie says he was ‘much more interested in what was happening inside: on the story of the internal fluids that provoke desire’. He therefore structured Sécrétions Magnifiques around a fictitious ‘adrenaline accord’ with saline, mineral aspects, ‘which acts as a conductor body where all the other substances can soak’.
Sécrétions Magnifiques had been conceived as a buzz-generating oddity; both Lie and de Swardt thought it might only please five people in the world. It went on to become one of the brand’s best-sellers, though some might buy it as a novelty item (the État Libre d’Orange flagship store sits at the edge of the Parisian gay quarter, le Marais). Still, I have seen some people come to the shop to replenish their stock. But Lie is well aware that the buzz is closer to lynching than love-in: ‘I even read that someone like me should be locked up in an asylum…’ he told me. ‘People say it’s disgusting but, for me, the mechanics of internal fluids represent beauty in its purest state. Because in fact, that’s what’s true. When you feel an emotion, it’s triggered inside, hormones circulate, blood pulses, you sweat, you get goose bumps … That’s what I wanted to express: that what happens inside smells like that. It’s not disgusting. It seems disgusting to you, but it’s something true: you don’t cheat.’
Who says fragrance could not be as disturbing as any other art form?
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If anything shocks me, it isn’t a perfume that smells of spunk or funk. It is a perfume that’s been face-lifted, liposuctioned and laser-resurfaced out of any likeness to its former self: vandalized.
Today, I went a stealth mission in the Champs-Élysées Sephora with a two-millilitre phial nestled in the palm of my hand. I needed a few drops of a 70s classic for my course at the London College of Fashion: my twenty-year-old students have never known the disco era. Most of their parents were barely pubescent at the time. So I made a grab for the tester bottle, took a sniff and let out a little yelp – so much for stealth. Surely this was one of the limited-edition variations the brand put out each year. I double-checked. The bottle had been changed, but it was definitely the original version in eau de toilette. Well, the juice had probably been cooked by the display lights. I grabbed the eau de parfum tester … God knows that particular smell is seared into my memory. There are probably still molecules of it lodged in my bone marrow, left over from those three years working in a high-end department store at Christmas where I inhaled the stuff for days on end … It seems yet another classic has been spayed. I’ll miss loathing it.
* * *
Your favourite perfume doesn’t smell the way it used to? Don’t try complaining to the sales assistants: they’ll swear blind your ‘chemistry’ or sense of smell have changed and you’ll go home wondering whether you’ve been hit by early menopause. But don’t book an appointment with your gynaecologist yet: most likely, it’s what’s in the bottle that’s undergone the Change. You just haven’t been told about it.
Reformulation is the perfume industry’s best-kept secret. You’d think altering the nature of a product without notifying consumers would amount to fraud. But since the people who have the competence actually to demonstrate the change work for the perfume industry, all we’ve got to go on is our nose. The practice isn’t new: perfumes have always been reformulated. Labs tweak their products over the years. As companies change hands, formulas may be lost altogether. But, mostly, perfumes are reformulated either to scratch the bean-counters’ itch or to prevent you from getting one. After all, it is a well-documented fact that entire populations were wiped out by pruritus after having dabbed on a drop of Joy.
The perfume industry had been merrily blending away when it suddenly decided to clean up its act by finding out which materials could potentially be harmful to consumers. Rather than have public authorities poke their noses into their formulas, it decided to self-regulate. The International Fragrance Association (IFRA) was founded in 1961: its members agree to comply with its standards on raw materials (i.e. which percentage can be used in the formula, according, for instance, to whether the product is ‘leave-on’ like fragrance and moisturizer, or ‘rinse-off’ like shampoo or soap). Based on data collected by the Research Institute on Fragrance Materials (RIFM) and its members, IFRA publishes yearly amendments to those standards. And each year, another material that’s been used for decades, centuries or even millennia is restricted or banned. IFRA standards are not legally binding since it is a private industry organization, but several countries base their legislation on them.
Is there any way out of those standard
s? Well, unless you’re an indie perfumer who makes up all her blends herself and sells them directly to her customers, if you have to produce a certain volume you’ll have to get your oils made up by a lab, and that lab will almost certainly be IFRA-compliant. Even if you wanted to go ahead and use banned or restricted materials, you might not be able to find them, or have to pay through the nose for them, as producers stop growing, distilling or synthesizing them because they can find no outlets.
Neither allergists nor regulators and legislators care about the fact that putting the hex on hydroxycitronellal or oak moss will disfigure a slew of masterpieces. They’re not even aware there’s a problem. To them, fragrance is a consumer product and if an ingredient can give rashes, even to less than 0.1% of the population, they figure you can just replace it with a perfectly innocuous substance. The problem is that there are no perfectly innocuous substances and that, as you replace one thing with another, that new thing will trigger allergies in turn as more people are exposed to it. And you don’t tinker with a perfume formula as you would with a detergent’s or a weed-killer’s. While the two latter might be as effective with a different ingredient, it’s the former’s very nature that is altered. Perfume formulas are delicate balances: change one material and the whole structure is skewed. And lest you think that only evil, lab-concocted chemicals are the culprits, think again: we’re talking about bergamot, rose, jasmine, basil, tarragon, cinnamon, clove … vanilla! Though when IFRA tried to restrict that particularly popular material, or rather vanillin, the industry balked and the regulators backed off. It would have probably meant reformulating more than half the perfumes on the market.
The issue boils down to this: our society has given in to the zero-risk mentality. To decision-makers, whether corporate or institutional, public safety – and avoiding lawsuits – will always trump aesthetic achievement or cultural heritage. As the perfumer of a legendary house told me, ‘It’s no use trying to convince politicians to ease up on regulations. They’ll reply that, since our products are useless, the least they can do is to be totally innocuous.’
Ah, yes. The perfumers. You’d think they’d be the first to complain that their palette is being reduced, that they’re forced to reformulate their own products or do hatchet jobs on those of their predecessors. Do they speak up? Let’s say there’s a lot of grumbling and hand-wringing going on in the wings and a few polite throat-clearings in the press. Mostly, they get on with their jobs since they can manage to do beautiful things with what’s left. It’s not like they’re going to take up pottery instead, is it? But they are starting to realize that certain styles will be rendered impossible: how can you play on the overdose of a material – and many masterpieces were the result of an overdosed material – when only piddling quantities are allowed? When the standards can change from one year to another? The younger perfumers have never used the restricted materials so they don’t know what they’re missing. And the older ones who could have spoken out while there was still time say that when the whole regulatory kerfuffle cropped up they thought it would blow over. It didn’t. Regulatory organizations tend to take on a life of their own and to metastasize until they choke the body that hosts them. Besides, bringing up the issue of allergens and toxicity in the media, even to defend the innocuousness of perfumes, would only fire up the public’s chemo-phobia. Never mind that the restricted allergens are often molecules present in natural materials, and that you can probably absorb more methyl chavicol in one bowl of pasta al pesto than by bathing in your old Eau Sauvage for a year. And never mind that peanuts, which can literally kill, are nowhere near being banned; that trees aren’t being uprooted because their pollen gives hay fever to a significant part of the population. You’ve got to eat, and uprooting trees would bring every environmental organization out of the woods. But perfume is useless: no one’s going to go up in arms for it. Who cares as long as the stuff still smells nice? Who cares that beauty is being blasted into oblivion by bureaucrats bent on protecting us from ourselves, and by luxury groups who make their money from new launches and don’t care much what becomes of their classics? The brainchildren of perfumers are being hung, drawn and quartered. And with them, the olfactory heritage of generations, our memories, our emotions; for those of us who’ve worn a scent all our lives, it is our very aura that’s being ripped out of our flesh.
* * *
The omertà on reformulations was broken by a man I’ll love forever for writing that he’d ‘risk scrofula’ to get his old Brut back, though I have no love for Brut. Luca Turin provided perfume aficionados with their first cause célèbre, the fate of Mitsouko, by alerting them to its impending reformulation by Guerlain due to new restrictions on oak moss, a material essential to its formula. Mitsouko became the poster child of everything that had been good about perfumery and everything that was going wrong. It took on the status of the Ultimate Cult Perfume, the one fragrance lovers desperately struggled to ‘get’, as though not ‘getting’ it somehow disqualified them.
It is sadly ironic that the perfume community started coalescing at the time when the classics were being irreparably defaced due to a surge in regulations. We’d found the way to Shangri-la just as promoters were tearing it down. For a few months in the fall of 2005, I wondered whether I should stock up on Mitsouko before the old formula was pulled off the shelves. I was desperately broke at the time and had to skip several lunches to snatch a bottle before it underwent its surgical reconstruction. In all fairness to Guerlain, it did limit the damage by entrusting the reformulation to the senior perfumer Édouard Fléchier, and is now campaigning to get its classics exempted from regulations as part of the French cultural heritage so that their original formulas can be restored.
But back in 2005, l’affaire Mitsouko triggered a frantic vintage-collecting phase. For several months, I tried to get hold of as many old bottles as I could afford. I received parcels so regularly I ended up having a short affair with the cute mailman, who’d look at me, barefoot and dishevelled in my tatty vintage silk kimono, as though I were fully made-up in a satin marabou-trimmed negligee, and murmur, ‘I love waking you up…’
* * *
If a bottle is kept away from the light and heat, perfume can actually keep for decades, though a few of the top notes may have turned. Hold out until they’ve evaporated, usually within a few minutes, and you’ll discover the perfume as it was intended to be, with richer, more vibrant materials, a higher proportion of natural essences and some synthetics that are no longer used: nitro-musks, for instance, which literally made the other notes pop out in 3-D. Today, half my refrigerator has become a branch of the Osmothèque, the Versailles institution where old formulas are preserved and reproduced. But instead of holding fresh reconstitution, my collection is the final resting place of bottles produced in bygone decades: a cemetery of flowers.
There is something poignant about those rows of bottles, some of which are older than me. I bought most of them boxed and sealed: why did they go unworn and unloved? Take this bottle of Scandal wrapped in logoed Lanvin paper. Was it a disdained gift? Since the owner never opened it, she didn’t even know the box held one of the most beautiful leather fragrances in history. Maybe it was never even given to her. Maybe she passed away before wearing it … More poignant still is the awareness that, every time I dip a blotter into one of those bottles, every time I extract a few drops with a disposable pipette to dab on my skin or show to my students, I am annihilating a bit of the past. Once the bottle is used up, there will never be another one. I can always engage in a bidding war on online auction sites with fellow perfume lovers or our arch-foes, the bottle collectors, Huns who’ll just let the stuff bake in well-lit display cabinets. But there are just so many knocking about, all fading away, oxidizing, surrendering molecule after molecule to the air despite being sealed – what cognac distillers call ‘the share of the angels’. Once they’ve gone, that’s it: perfume is a lesson in letting go. Though, given the size of my stash, I could probably
live to be one hundred and still be embalmed in the stuff.
But there is one bottle I’ll cry when I empty. A bottle so rare that the mere fact I own it hatches plots to burglarize my flat. The French couturier Jacques Fath launched Iris Gris in 1947, but he died prematurely in 1954 and Iris Gris was soon discontinued because it was expensive to produce and a commercial flop, hence its extreme rarity. I had no hope of smelling it outside the Osmothèque until I happened on an open-air flea market under the aerial metro that runs past the Eiffel Tower. Eyes peeled, I wandered from stall to stall. My knees turned wobbly when I spotted it. No more than one fifth evaporated, sealed, boxed. I stole away with my precious. I knew I’d got hold of a myth.
I felt the unsealing of Iris Gris needed a witness and had invited Octavian Coifan. We met under the gilded mirrors of the café Le Nemours by the Palais-Royal. That first dip of the blotter knotted my stomach … Had it gone bad? I took one sniff and grinned like an idiot. Octavian practically started purring. It was impeccable. What first jumped out of the strip was the peach, as smooth as a Renoir model’s downy cheek. Octavian, who’d come equipped, handed me blotters of orris absolute, irone (the molecule that develops in orris butter when it ages) and ionones (the violet smell) for comparison. And, magically, iris came to the fore, its slight metallic tinge softened by the peach. Musky, with raspberry, apricot and leather overtones, the merest touch of a floral heart and a tiny celery note … The effect was amazingly modern and spare: Iris Gris could’ve been composed yesterday. In fact, it could walk circles around any iris scent on the market.
The Perfume Lover Page 17