I met a woman that owns and runs a high-end — very high-end — niche perfume company. She gave me a few samples to play with. This is fun.
Recently, I’ve been learning a few things about perfume, much of it from a book, Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. They are perfume critics.
It has some interesting overlaps with audio, which go something like this: There is a scientific element, circuit design or perfume chemistry, but it quickly comes down to artistic sensibility, which doesn’t really have any science to go on, but is not entirely subjective either. Talking about audio has often generated taste and smell metaphors — one writer compared the sound of an amplifier to the smell of a sixteen-year-old cheerleader, which does tell you something doesn’t it? — and since most taste is really smell, why not go now from smell metaphors to actual smell?
Basically it is a field of connoisseurship, much like that for wines or fine Scotch whiskeys.
So now we learn some interesting things about perfume, from perfume aficionados.
The first is: What Is Perfume For?
We tend to assume that it is “to attract the opposite sex,” so let’s see what the perfume critic has to say about it:
The question that women casually shopping for perfume ask more than any other is this: “What scent drives men wild?” After years of intense research, we know the definitive answer. It is bacon.
It turns out that reading a book about perfume is fun. This is interesting, because something that can inspire an old man with a PhD in biophysics (Turin) to phraseology of life-changing ecstasy, even after decades of experience to temper the enthusiasm, might be worthwhile. Perfume apparently makes people good writers. (Audio apparently does not make people good writers. No more “like a veil was lifted” please.)
Advice for men is much the same. Perfume (or “cologne”) doesn’t seem to have any particular relevance or effect on women.
The next interesting question is: When Should You Wear Perfume?
The answer comes in the form of: When You Should Not Wear Perfume.
Don’t wear perfume when you are eating. Flavors are mostly smell, and you don’t want your herbed salmon and zinfandel competing with perfume. Also, restaurants and dinner parties usually involve sitting next to someone else for a long period of time, and they might not like your perfume even if you do. This extends also to any public situation where you might be sitting next to someone for a long period of time, maybe on a plane or in a movie theater.
Don’t wear perfume at work. It is not very businesslike, and again you are in an enclosed space for a long period of time. You don’t want to be the least popular person in the office elevator.
This leaves some social events without eating, something like a cocktail party or a nicer sort of bar, basically as an accessory for ambitious clothing, but maybe it is not even relevant. It probably includes “social” events without clothing, although the authors have nothing to say about that.
The answers, then are:
Wear Perfume Because You Like The Smell.
Wear Perfume When You Can Enjoy It Without Bothering Others. This might mean at home, or shopping at Whole Foods.
With that established, we can now go on to: Who Cares?
Perfume enthusiasts care, of course. There are some formulations that are considered some of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century. Let’s see what they have to say about one of them, Mitsouko by Guerlain.
On every occasion when I am asked to name my favorite fragrance, or the best fragrance ever, or the fragrance I would take with me if I had to move to Mars for tax reasons, I always answer Mitsouko. This elicits, broadly speaking, three types of responses: perfumers yawn, beginners write the name down, and aficionados decide I am a staid sort of chap. In truth, it is a bit like saying that your favorite painting is the Mona Lisa (not mine, by the way). Mitsouko’s history illustrates to perfection the twin forces of innovation and imitation that move perfumery forward. It was released in 1919, supposedly the result of a love affair Jacques Guerlain had with Japan or a lady therein. But there is nothing Japanese about Mitsouko aside from the name. It is, as has been said countless times before, an improvement on François Coty’s Chypre, released to huge acclaim two years earlier. Chypre in turn was based on a three-component accord so perfect that it remains unsurpassed and fertile in new developments ninety years later: bergamot, labdanum, and oakmoss. They smell respectively citrus-resinous, sweet-amber-resinous, and bitter-resinous. Picture them as equal sectors making up a pie chart, sticking to each other via the resin. The resulting genre, now called a chypre, has two fundamental qualities: balance and abstraction. Chypre is long gone, but I’ve had occasion to smell both vintage samples and the Osmothègue reconstruction in Versailles. It is brilliant, but it does have a big-boned, bad-tempered Joan Crawford feel to it, and was a fragrance in whose company you could never entirely rest your weight. Jacques Guerlain was Juan Gris to Coty’s Picasso; obsessed with fullness, finish, detail. To Chypre he famously added the peach note of undecalactone, quite a lot of iris and probably twenty other things we’ll never know about. The lactone makes a huge difference: it works like a Tiffany lamp, adds a touch of muted warmth and color, and unlike ester-based fruit notes, lasts forever. The effect of Guerlain’s additions is a ripening of the chypre structure into a masterpiece whose richness brings to my mind the mature chamber music of Johannes Brahms. Mitsouko is also a survivor, most recently having dodged a bullet aimed straight at its heart by the European Union’s chemical phobia. It looked for a while as if it was going to be reformulated in a hurry. In the end, the great Edouard Fléchier brought Mitsouko into conformity with European Union rules and it still smells great, though it arguably lasts less long than the old one.
In other words, it is a perfume that an old man (Turin) enjoys at home, in something like the way an old man might also appreciate the mature chamber music of Johannes Brahms. Perhaps he even wears it while out and about, because why not.
Here, coauthor Tania Sanchez describes how she got interested in perfume.
I liked to play with perfume but never thought much of it until at seventeen I found the Guerlain counter at Saks. I’d sought it out because my roommate was crazy about a forceful thing they made called Samsara, which, while something I absolutely didn’t want to wear, had a worked-out quality that seemed a notch above what I was used to. The first thing I tried was the recent release Champs-Elysées, which had the starring role on the counter. I nearly ran off. It was a sharp and shallow floral to go with Lucite-heeled shoes and a ditzy high-pitched laugh that goes on so long it makes your companions gesture to the bartender to cut you off. For some reason, before heading home, I looked a little further and paused at one labeled L’Heure Bleue. The eau de toilette bottles at that time had the shape of squat lutes, a black serif typeface like a printer’s error on the clear glass, and tall plastic caps imitating gilded lacquer—in a word, ugly. In this unpromising container I found the most beautiful thing I’d ever smelled. I bought it with my food budget for the month and put the silly bottle in a dark cabinet so I wouldn’t have to look at it. I wore it quietly and rarely, because I couldn’t afford to buy another, and I never told anyone what it was, because the name’s particular combination of gargling French r’s and pursed-lipped eu sounds was unprocessable by the American ear, most of all when pronounced correctly—all of which had the effect of giving my love for it the fraught significance of a secret affair.
The second time I fell for a perfume, things were not so complicated. I was down to the last half inch of L’Heure Bleue in the bottle, I was out of college, and I was desultorily spraying everything on the girls’ side of Sephora, finding dozens of nice things but nothing that moved me much. Until I found that little black rubber puck. Look up Luca’s review of Bulgari’s Black farther along in the book, and then buy it and wear it and know what I mean. My first love was simply beautiful; the second was both beautiful and interesting. I began to have questions.
L’Heure Bleue and Black are listed as among the twenty greatest fragrances of all time. And, she easily picked them out of a lineup of dozens of lesser fragrances, even other fragrances from Guerlain, one of the top houses, apparently without any help from expert opinion. This shows that perfume is aesthetic, but not purely subjective: better really is better, for some definite reason, although it is hard to explain why.
