My
first memories of baths date back to early childhood, when
my father would deposit me along with my two sisters in the tub for
an economy-of-scale suds-up. Yes, we all fit: three girls in four
years was what my contraceptively challenged parents—while still
undergraduate students—managed to produce during the first three
years and six months of a marriage which finally ended around my
sixteenth birthday. No need to express condolences: divorce was the
best thing that ever happened to my parents' marriage. Aside, of
course, from its fruits—mistakes though we may have seemed to be at
the time...
Both
of my parents have been happily remarried now for many years, much
longer than they were married to one another, which would seem to
suggest that mutual fertility is not a sufficient basis for a stable
marriage, notwithstanding the “grand plan” of whoever—if
anyone—devised the preposterous pregnancy scheme. Marriage has of
course enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in recent times, but I
suspect that all of the excitement will eventually die down—perhaps
in seven years? In the meantime, I think that any couple—straight
or gay—interested in tying the proverbial knot (what a metaphor!)
should be required first to do a dramatic reading à
haute voix of
Ionesco's play Délire
à Deux.
If, having successfully completed that exercise, the happy couple is
still intent on taking vows, all I can say is: more
power to them!
But I digress...
A
civil engineer by training and in mindset, my father, in addition to
having fun regaling us with rhymes such as “Scrub-a-dub-dub: three
girls in a tub!” undoubtedly derived a measure of satisfaction
through conserving both time and water by bathing us in this way.
Indeed, his area of specialization is none other than dams and
irrigation systems!
I
have no other clear memories of baths for many, many years. I believe
that I took only showers during high school, and I certainly did not
take baths while living in the college dormitories. I am not even
sure whether the shared bathrooms had anything but shower stalls.
That's how little importance bathing in a tub had for me. I do seem
vaguely to recall that someone barfed in a bathtub somewhere, during a
party at which Koolaid spiked with Everclear was being served. (Was
it, perhaps, me?)
Fast
forward to today, and here I am a full-fledged bath addict. This is
no exaggeration: I do not even feel clean unless I take a full-on
soak in a tub, and on those occasions when I am forced to forgo my
bathing ritual because of traveling, I await with great anticipation
the opportunity to return home where I'll be able to bathe once again
in the manner to which I have grown quite accustomed. Mind you, I am
not an obsessive-compulsive hand washer, or anything of that kind.
I
observed one of those people recently in the bathroom at the library.
She was lathering up and scrubbing her arms and hands when I entered
a stall, and she was lathering up and scrubbing her arms and hands
when I left the stall. I stood briefly next to her in what may have
seemed to be a show of hygienic solidarity, a couple of sinks down.
But after I had spent maybe ten seconds washing my hands and reached
for a paper towel, she was still standing there, lathering up and
scrubbing her arms and hands. No, you may rest assured, I am nothing
like that.
I
suspect, however, that some shower advocates may view me in just that
way when I say that I honestly feel that a thorough cleansing can
only be accomplished through a bath. Perhaps they, too, will smile
politely and walk quickly away—or the internet equivalent: navigate
away from this page... I imagine five-minute hot shower takers asking
in their minds, Really?
You only take
baths? in entirely
sincere puzzlement over how someone could waste so much time.
I
went from nearly no memory of having taken baths to wishing only to
take baths. I am by now so habituated to baths, an important part of
which involves lying in a supine reclining position, that I consider
showers even to be a form of work. Standing
up? Really? is my
natural rejoinder of puzzlement to the advocate of showers who cannot
imagine spending an entire hour—or even half—on a bath.
Having numbered for so many years among those who take only showers, I do of course understand why people opt for them. Yes, it is true: they are quick. And yes, it is true: they work in shared bathroom arrangements such as dorms and houses where not all inhabitants have private bathing quarters. I recall that a fellow living in a house where I was renting a room at one point in the Los Angeles area used to leave the bathtub half-full of dark gray, opaque water, clogged as the drain was with his body hair. No, this is not a joke. Ian was his name.
Two
other renters, Ann and Stan, also lived in that house, and so did the
landlord and his wife, but the person whom I'll never, ever forget—no
matter how old I eventually become, and even if I lapse into an
advanced state of senility—is Ian. In addition to being ape-ily
hairy, Ian also left a strong acrid odor behind wherever he went—a
trail of sillage, if you like—even after having bathed. I think
that it is fair to say that anyone who rejects The Myth of the Skin Chemistry Myth never shared a house with Ian. What would Chanel
no 5 smell like on Ian?
Honestly, I do not want to know. Come to think of it, although he did
not fully bubble up in my mind at the time, Ian was perhaps the
ultimate subconscious inspiration for one of my proofs: The case of
the stinky guy.
Taking a bath in such a tub, shared with such a fellow as Ian, was never
going to happen, for obvious reasons. The whole experience of even
wanting to shower in that tub on a day when Ian had already been
there was in itself a sheer nightmare, a veritable horror story
rivaled only by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
At the time, however, I myself was a showers-only type, so the
challenge each morning became to beat Ian to the bathroom. I'd scuffle down the hall as quickly as I could in jammies and rubber flip-flops, mug of
French roast in hand, fluffy white robe in tow, to take my shower and scurry back to my room, deeply
relieved to have escaped the horror which would now await some other
poor unsuspecting soul.
A
Question of Culture?
Americans,
on the whole, are a part of a showering culture. Baths tend to be
reserved for special occasions: to soothe sore muscles in Epsom salts
after running a marathon, or to help clear one's congested sinuses
with an herbal remedy including eucalyptus and the like... I
understand that culture, because I, too, was a part of it for most of
my life. Even when I lived in a beautiful house in the mountains and
had a private bath, I used it only infrequently as a tub, to
alleviate stress. Baths back then were a type of event, not an
ordinary way to cleanse myself.
So
how in the world did this radical transformation, from a showers-only
person to a baths-only person, take place? Interestingly enough, the
changes in my attitudes toward showers and baths, like the
circumstances of my birth, were entirely a matter of chance and, some
might even say, negligence. I discovered that an apartment which I had
rented with a one-year lease had a bathtub with a malfunctioning
shower head. The nozzle barely dribbled any water at all, but when I
pointed this out, the skinflint landlord insisted that it was
supposed to function like that.
Everyone,
I trust, has run into one or more of those “special” landlords
who insist that everything is exactly as it should be. Whether I
liked it or not, my only real option for cleansing myself during that
year became taking a bath. What I found, hundreds of baths later was
that I actually enjoy taking baths. Slowly but surely my entire
perspective on bathing ended up transforming to the point where I
never, ever shower at home anymore. I am so much a bather at this
point that after moving to the house in which I now reside, I did not
even bother to hang up the shower curtain and rod until some house
guests arrived!
Ironic
though it may seem, it is nonetheless true: as a direct result of a
cheapskate landlord, today I feel deprived whenever I find myself in
a shower-only scenario. This happens when I travel to a place where
hotels either do not come equipped with bathtubs, or they do but for
one reason or another it is infeasible to render them acceptably
clean. I am very picky about bathtubs: they must be spotless in order
for me to soak my body in one. I realize that this may make me sound
a bit like the woman in the library bathroom compulsively lathering
and scrubbing her arms and hands, but I do here confess that I will
not bathe in a hotel bathtub which I have not scrupulously inspected
for cleanliness.
Not
a problem in a couple of parts of the world, above all, Japan, the
bathing capital of the universe, where spotless baththubs—and sencha tea centers—are de
rigueur! I have also
often been pleasantly surprised by the accommodations in Europe,
especially Italy. Europeans, while not quite obsessed with bathing—as
the Japanese truly are, to their credit, I hasten to add—do seem to
appreciate that a good bath tub is just as essential as a good bed.
Or a bidet! Some of the most beautiful bath tubs and bathrooms I've
ever encountered were found in Italy and in Spain.
I
never intended to become a bather, but it happened, and now I
honestly cannot imagine forgoing what has become my bath ritual.
Along the way, I became a major consumer of bath products, and thanks
to the ridiculous biannual sales at Bath & Body Works and The
Body Shop, I could probably go for years without needing to buy
anything. Every time I consider the possibility of moving, in fact, I
realize that I need to decrease my gross shipping weight before doing
so. I did give away about a thousand books last year, and I no
longer buy either CDs or DVDs, but despite having skipped the sales
at BBW and TBS, I still have an impressive array of bath and shower
gels, scrubs, and lotions. And then, of course, there are the
colognes and perfumes.
Am
I “hoarding” bath products? I think not, because the variety is
very important to me. A day when I wish to take a citrus bath is not
at all like a day when I'd rather soak in lavender or jasmine or
cherry blossom or... the list goes on and on. I delight in selecting
which bath bubbles to run under the faucet, and I coordinate scrubs
and soaps and even hair products so as to complement the scented
water. As a part of my ritual I also apply Borghese Fango mud to my
face, and I may actually hold the record for the most tonnage of that
product consumed by any individual person.
Deontology
versus Teleology: Showers versus Baths
I
suspect that eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the most famous deontologist in history, preferred showers. According to
Kant, morality is a matter of duty: it is not because of the benefits
which one can expect to derive from doing the right thing that one
should do the right thing. No, consequences have no relevance,
morally speaking, in Kant's view. You
should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do!
 |
| Immanuel Kant, author of The Metaphysics of Morals |
Americans
certainly seem, for the most part, to regard showering as a duty to
execute, not a pleasure to enjoy—except insofar as removing dirt
can be a source of relief. One of my sisters, a deeply entrenched
shower advocate—who perhaps not uncoincidentally also has a
dog—insists that baths increase the incidence of urinary tract
infections. She once expressed extreme distaste for my predilection
for baths in these terms:
How
can you stand to sit there in a pool of dirty water?!
To
which I replied:
The
water is not dirty, BECAUSE I BATHE!
I
do not doubt that a person who takes only showers over many years
with nary a bath would indeed create a dirty pool of water just like
Ian, the fellow whose sole distinction in my memory bank is to have
been the stinkiest person I ever knew. What else did he do? I have no idea.
Anecdotally,
I can report that the first time I bathed HRH Emperor Oliver, the
bath water was indeed rather dark and gray. He had never been dipped
in a tub throughout his entire life, why? Because cats have
superlative personal hygiene and shun bodies of water larger than the
volume of space which their body occupies.
Since
his retirement, it has become necessary to provide some bathing assistance to The Emperor now and then, as a result of which
I have become convinced that in fact all cats hold within their minds
a quasi-Jungian “collective unconsciousness” fear of drowning. I
suspect that it is the image of small kittens being mercilessly
terminated “with extreme prejudice” in a pond by some illiterate
and sadistic hick which may surface inchoately—to a greater or
lesser degree, depending on the intellectual capacity of the cat—when
they first face the specter of a bath.
Happily,
dozens of baths later, The Emperor has learned that drowning at the
Divine Feline Assisted Living Retirement Community is not an option.
It's not going to happen, so long as his chief of staff is standing
by. Having largely overcome his initial reluctance to bathe, The
Emperor today enjoys the benefits of hydrotherapy so dear to bath
lovers more generally and especially helpful to those such as he, who
suffer from diabetes and debilitating neuropathy in their legs, feet,
and toes. But I digress...
 |
| HRH Emperor Oliver relaxes after a bath and blowdry |
The
Bath-Perfume Connection
While
bathing recently—one day in satsuma, the next in grapefruit and
citron, the third in lavender and chamomile, and yesterday in Fresh
Citron de Vigne
shower gel—it occurred to me that the attitudes of many people
toward perfume can be mapped onto their attitudes toward bathing along
two different axes. First, it seems clear that some, perhaps
many, people think of perfume use in purely functional terms, just as
they think about showering.
Consider,
for example, the “panty dropper” threads which get started over
and over again by new visitors to fragrance community websites. This
may seem risible to veteran perfumistas, who regard themselves as
having a higher appreciation of perfume, often as an art form, but
the reality seems to be that most consumers use perfume as a way of
increasing their own attractability to persons with whom they may become
romantically involved.
I
myself found this factoid rather unbelievable, but in a fashion
magazine a couple of years ago, in one of the relatively rare
features on perfume, the statistic was reported that the number one
reason why French women use perfume is to attract a mate! That was a
sobering statistic to me, generally inclined to believe as I am that
the French tend to be leaps and bounds above Americans in terms of
sophistication. Meaning, of course, that the statistic for Americans
could only be worse.
There
is another axis along which perfume appreciation can be mapped, and
this one does not point toward the same rather self-congratulatory
conclusion, that most perfume users are philistines and only elite
perfumistas appreciate the artistry of vrai
parfum and the work of
“olfactory artists,” to invoke here Chandler Burr's term for
accomplished perfumers. This second axis is that of pure sensory
experience, which does not seem to me to be relevantly distinct in
the case of bathing and perfume use. In other words, thinking about
perfume use in purely phenomenological terms, as a subjective
experience, the use of perfume may be much closer to bathing than
perfumistas ordinarily suppose—unless, of course, they happen to be
bath addicts like me.
One reason why I love bathing is because I am enveloped in the process not only by warm water, but also by beautiful scents. This leads back to the question, perhaps vexing to some, whether perfume really is different in any fundamental way from other toiletries, to wit: bath and shower gel, soaps, scrubs, lotions, oils, etc. There are more and less sophisticated toiletries, to be sure, and people may use them and appreciate them to varying degrees. But let us consider the case of bath and shower gels which have been scented with perfumes which we ourselves already affirm as excellent.
Is it any less of an experience of perfume to smell it wafting off the water or off the skin of a freshly bathed and lotioned body than it is to spritz on the perfume itself? In terms of the pure olfactory experience of the perfume, I cannot for the life of me figure out why one of these forms of perfume experience should differ from the other. The truth, it seems to me, is that we appreciate perfume, above all, for the pleasure it provides.
Read
all the perfume reviews you like, you will find that the fundamental
judgments derive nearly exclusively from an answer to the question
whether the wearer enjoys the experience of the perfume being
reviewed. That is the bottom line. Reviews invariably circle back to
the reviewer: specifically, the effect that the perfume has upon the
wearer.
Is
this true of the nonperfumic arts? Do we evaluate the quality of a
poem or a piece of music or a film by describing their effects upon
us? Perhaps on some level and in part, but only a small portion of a
review of any object of art explicitly references the experiencer.
The rest points outward to the object itself.
In
contrast, in the case of perfume, everything turns on the subjective
experience, and the very terms which one selects in attempting to
convey one's experience point back to the wearer. This seems to me to
provide grounds for skepticism about the status of perfume as an art.
People who love perfume would naturally like there to be objective
truths about the object of their love, but the reason why even “the experts” do not agree, it seems to me, is that their reviews
always say much more about them than about the ostensible object of
their critique.
The
object under review in the case of perfume is tied up essentially
with the reviewer, because everything which he or she consciously
perceives is determined by facts about him or her, not facts about
the perfume. In addition to having entirely different personal
histories, human beings are differentially sensitive to all of the
various components of any perfume, which is how and why people with
vast experience in sniffing perfumes and familiarity with even
thousands of them can radically disagree about a question as
fundamental as whether it is any good.
What
matter in evaluations of perfume are not objective facts about the
creation—what particular chemical substances were used to create a
certain perceptual quality—but our subjective reception of it
conjoined with our personal tastes. In fact, tastes appear to do most
of the evaluative work. We like this or that note: patchouli, tuberose, benzoin, etc. We dislike this or
that note: rubber, cumin, pineapple, etc. Therefore, if a perfume features those things which we happen
to like and we also happen to like their conjunction, then that alone
will suffice to make our experience of it a positive one. “Your
mileage may vary,” but to us, which is all that matters in our own
evaluation of a perfume, it ends up seeming like either a masterpiece
or a disaster or, more often, somewhere in between those two
extremes, based largely upon what we happen to like.
Now,
one might reply that people's tastes in art vary as well, and this is
true. The difference, however, is that in the case of perfume, tastes
do the bulk of the work of evaluation. Everything turns upon
individual tastes and preferences. To praise a perfume is to enjoy
the experience of wearing it. This is why the more a reviewer writes,
the more he reveals—not about the perfume but about himself.
Setting
to one side all of the vapid chatter about art, I must own that when
I make a judgment about perfume, the bottom line is that a good or
bad perfume to my nose is rather simple to define. I derive pleasure
from the former and not from the latter. This is not an objective
judgment and reveals the folly involved in issuing imperious decrees
about which perfumes are masterpieces and which are disasters.
In
order to do such a thing, one would first have to assume the exalted status of one's own subjective values and tastes, in addition to
one's heightened ability to perceive all of the many components of a
perfume. Who can make such a claim, in complete sincerity? I know of
no one, to be perfectly frank. Indeed, the two requirements would
appear to be mutually exclusive. Moreover, a great or accomplished nose is
probably not the best person to seek out for advice on which perfumes
to buy. Why? Because your less than great nose will not detect the
same things and to the same degree. In other words, you will smell
what is essentially a different perfume than did he.
What
I have learned about perfume through reflecting upon bathing while
bathing is that pleasure, my fragrant friends, is the bottom line.
There is no more and no less to perfume than that. We may, in our
vanity, wish to follow the lead of thinkers such as the
nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, who
distinguished higher from lower pleasures, claiming that
It
is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied;
better
to be Socrates dissatisfied
than
a fool satisfied.
It
is unclear from this pithy little adage whether it is supposed to be better
to be a pig satisfied or a fool satisfied, but I suspect that Mill
was not a vegetarian and may well have joined his compatriots in repasts frequently featuring offal.
 |
| John Stuart Mill, author of Utilitarianism |
In
any case, what seems indisputable to me is that what we may wish to honorifically label "olfactory art" is in fact an exceptionally pleasurable scent. It may
be complex and unfurl in waves so as to induce in us olfactory
delight. It may surprise us and lead us down new paths of our
thoughts and evoke memories of times past and things lost.
Experiencing perfume is a sensual process which begins with our nose
and ends in our brain, but the measure of a good perfume is only the
pleasure which it provides.
What
does hedonism imply?
Just
as people may adopt a certain attitude toward cleansing their body,
viewing it as a necessity, a duty to be carried out, so, too, do
consumers sometimes become distracted by extrinsic factors. They may
become concerned by price, status (is it niche—or expensive—and
therefore, presumably, refined enough?), or even the celebrities or
models suggested or implied to be attached to the perfume through
advertising. In view of the size of marketing budgets for many
perfumes, it may well be the case that most consumers select the
bottles which end up in their boudoir by such olfactorily irrelevant
factors.
Such
perfumes, once owned, may be spritzed on without stopping to smell
the perfume, so to to speak. I see this, too, in the reviews written
by many self-styled perfumistas who report quick impressions and
often quite dismissively. Did the reviewer give the perfume the
benefit of a full wear—or two? Was the experience interrupted,
mediated, or curtailed by the wearer's memory of the experience of
another perfume in the past? Can we experience a perfume as an
isolated thing in itself? Probably not, given that our minds are not
a blank slate—and if they were we wouldn't be able to make sense of
anything anyway.
The famous deontologist Immanuel Kant never married, nor did he ever leave his
hometown of Königsberg.
Small wonder, then, that he had so much time for cogitation and the
composition of extremely lengthy sentences. Naturally, he had
something to say on this matter as well.
Kant rejected the possibility of naïve
empiricism—the pure, unmediated apprehension of reality—in these terms (translated from the German):
Percepts
without concepts are empty; concepts without percepts are blind.
In
some ways, bathing provides a superlative opportunity to reflect upon
a perfume, as one is not surrounded by all of the usual distractions
which can make it difficult to focus upon the olfactory experience
itself. How often do we wear a perfume in the way in which we listen
to a piece of music or watch a film? True, music is often playing in
the background while we do something else, but when we attend a
concert, we are there specifically to listen to the music, though we
may of course be distracted by such annoyances as audience members
who cough or talk during the performance. The same is true of our
experience of films and may help to explain why many people today
only watch films in the (quiet) privacy of their homes, made possible
by the existence of so many new technologies in a series which began
with videotapes and appears to be culminating in wireless media
streaming.
Even
perfumistas who exalt perfumery as an art may not actually dedicate
any independent time to the experience of perfume. They may use
perfume in the way in which they play background music while engaged
in activities very different from what one does while sitting in rapt
attention at a concert. Both music and perfume are nonrepresentational, but music is at least sometimes capable of capturing our undivided attention. Even further removed is the experience of a
film, which, being representational, can convey a message of one sort
or another. In the case of perfume, only one question really makes
much sense: Does the perfume provide pleasure? Do beautiful scents
fill you with joy?
One
implication of this bath-inspired way of looking at perfume would
seem to be that the provenance of a scent is irrelevant to one's
experience of it. Perhaps this is why I don't care who allegedly made
the first perfume in the history of the world to combine certain
notes together. It doesn't matter. What matters is that they were
brought together by someone—anyone—to produce a perfume capable
of inducing in me the sense of pleasure I feel upon donning it. We
may tell all the stories we like about perfumes, but our stories are
no more and no less personal confessions, in the end.
I leave you now to soak in these ideas and look forward to reading your thoughts on the matter. As for me, I do believe that it's time for a bath!
