Pre-Y2K Perfumery: The Way We Were

Review of 

Perfume: The Ultimate Guide to the World's FInest Fragrances 

by Nigel Groom 

This guide to perfume was published in 1999. To some, this may be a real turnoff. A text about perfume from fourteen years ago? Could anything in it still be true? Valid questions, yes. But also precisely why I cherish this little volume, the first perfume book I ever read, and still one of my favorites. Consider this charming little remark:

The economics of the industry are changing. More fragrances are coming out on the international market than ever before—some two or three hundred a year. Some will be successful, but many will fail and disappear.

Could Nigel Groom—could anyone—ever have predicted that in 2013, there would be 2,451 perfume launches (according to the Parfumo.net database)? In my previous post, I poked fun at the perfumistas who pronounced the best ten or so perfumes from 2013, pointing out that they could not possibly have tested even a small fraction of the perfumes produced in that year. I'm afraid that we lost some of the few links to the illustrious salon de parfum in the process, but it was a small price to pay for speaking the truth about an industry and subculture grounded intrinsically in hype.

Back in the twentieth century, it would have been possible to have sniffed all of the perfumes released in a single year. A "Guide" to perfume made sense back in 1992, when Turin first penned one in French. Today? Not so much. Today any "guide" can only serve as a marketing tool, encouraging consumers to pursue what they have not already been lured into buying as a result of mass market advertising campaigns.

In reflecting on this 1999 book and why I like it so much, I have come to the conclusion that the Michael Edwards Fragrances of the World volume best suited for me could not possibly be anything published later than 2006, when, in my considered opinion, all hell broke loose in the world of perfumery.

Why are older perfume books generally better, and why is Nigel Groom's 1999 volume one of the best? Because it captures the reality of pre-Y2K perfumery as it was when it was what it was, which it no longer is. The perfume world has undergone massive, radical, and seemingly irrevocable transformations over the course of the past decade. Let us review a few of them:

• corporate conglomeratization: nearly every single once-independent design house is now owned by one of the huge parent companies: LVMH, Procter & Gamble, Coty Prestige, L'oréal, Puig, Eurocosmesi, Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder, Parlux, et al.

• homogenization: the convergence of style of perfumes being produced by ostensibly distinct houses but under the same helm—say, Coty Prestige—is perhaps a natural consequence of the fact that those who call the shots do so for not just one house, but for a cluster of them simultaneously. 

• massive explosion of perfume launches: flankers and limited editions have become the rule, not the exception these days, with perfumes composed and released quickly and then followed up by namesakes cynically intended primarily to exploit all of the previous marketing campaigns leading up to the latest launch—touted invariably as the best new thing since Shalimar!

• massive proliferation of perfume houses: everyone and his mother, brother, father, uncle, aunt, cousin, second cousin, niece and nephew has suddenly awoken in the middle of the night to discover that, lo, they are "perfumers"!!!! From a few rugged individualists who set out to teach themselves perfumery, and in some cases were quite assiduous and serious about doing so, in addition to being olfactorily gifted, we have arrived at a time where people appear to be flipping coins: "heads, real estate; tails, niche perfumery!"

• massive expansion of celebrity launches: every two-bit reality show slut now has a perfume on the market--or ten! Having a perfume now appears to be a part of the aspiring singer's and actor's marketing platform—right up there with other forms of social media: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, you name it! What next? Oh, right: a perfume!

• Orwellian IFRA restrictions against the use of natural materials have been imposed  in the name of consumer health, with the surrogate materials being newfangled synthetics which have not stood the test of time (as the materials used in perfumery for millennia certainly have!). As a result of the willingness of perfumers to accede to tyrannical, corporate-generated demands, perfume is becoming more and more abstract, streamlined, and "clean" as a result. 

My fragrant friends, the above developments, all in the twenty-first century, have transmogrified the perfumery scene so fundamentally that some (many?) of us who fell in love with perfume in the twentieth century are having a difficult time navigating the terrain and even wondering in our less sanguine moments: Why bother?

Nigel Groom's book offers a glimpse into the world of perfumery as it once was, as it was when I, for one, developed an interest in the topic. Yes, there were parent companies; no, they were not behemoth omnivores. Yes, there were trends, but, no, there was no oud machine! Yes, there were unique bottles, but they were made of Lalique and Baccharat crystal, not covered with plastic diddily-doos! Yes, there were a few celebrity perfumes, thanks to Elizabeth Taylor. No, there certainly was not an entire celebrity perfume industry. Yes, there were innovations in the history of twentieth-century perfumery, such as the creative use of aldehydes in Chanel no 5. No, no one, not even the crassest, most jaded perfume executive in the twentieth century ever dared strip perfume of every single natural essence in the name of "health" guidelines drafted by people concerned to improve the bottom lines of the companies for which they work!

I love this little book because it offers a window into a world which no longer exists. But the perfume profiles featured describe and offer historical tidbits about the perfumes which I knew and loved: back when Samsara was still Samsara and Dolce Vita was Dolce Vita!

Here is a list of the houses covered in this slim volume, which explicitly restricts itself to women's perfume, and spans fewer than 200 pages. The fragrances of each house discussed are indicated as well:

1. Amouage: Amouage
2. Antonia's Flowers: Anotonia's Flowers
3. Elizabeth Arden: Blue Grass, Red Door, 5th Avenue
4. Armani: Giò
5. L'Artisan Parfumeur: Premier Figuier
6. Baccarat: Une Nuit Etoilée au Bengale
7. Parfums Balenciaga: Le Dix, Rumba
8. Parfums Balmain: Vent Vert, Ivoire
9. Bijan: DNA
10. Boucheron: Boucheron
11. Bourjois: Soir de Paris
12. Bvlgari Parfums: Bvlgari pour Femme
13. Parfums Cacharel: Anaïs Anaïs, Loulou
14. Parfums Caron: Fleur[s] de Rocaille (1933)--nb: this is an error! Fleur de Rocaille (1993) is pictured, not Fleurs de Rocaille (1933)!
15. Cartier: Must de Cartier, Panthère, So Pretty
16. Carven Parfums: Ma Griffe, Eau Vive
17. Parfums Cerruti: Cerruti 1881
18. Chanel: No 5, No 19, Allure
19. Mary Chess: Mary Chess
20. Parfums Chloé: Chloé, Narcisse
21. Chopard: Wish
22. Clarins: Eau Dynamisante
23. The House of Coty: L'Aimant, Vanilla Fields, Monsoon
24. The House of Creed: Royal Water
25. Crown Perfumery: Marechal, Crown Bouquet
26. Parfums Salvador Dali: Le Parfum, Le Roy Soleil
27. Davidoff: Cool Water Woman
28. Desprez: Bal à Versailles
29. Parfums Chrisian Dior: Miss Dior, Dune, Dolce Vita
30. Dolce & Gabbana Parfums: Dolce & Gabbana
31. Parfums d'Orsay: Etiquette Bleue
32. Escada: Escada, Sunny Frutti
33. Parfums Fendi: Theorema
34. Ferregamo: Salvatore Ferregamo pour Femme
35. Floris: Stephanotis, Gardenia
36. Jean-Paul Gaultier: Jean-Paul Gaultier
37. Romeo Gigli: Romeo 
38. Giorgio Beverly Hills: Giorgio, Wings, Ocean Dream
39. Parfums Givenchy: Amarige, Organza, Extravigance
40. Annick Goutal: Grand Amour, Heure Exquise
41. Parfums Grès: Cabochard, Folie Douce
42. Parfums Gucci: Envy
43. Guerlain: L'Heure Bleue, Samsara, Champs Elysées
44. Gale Hayman, Inc.: Delicious
45. Hermès Parfums: Calèche; 24, Faubourg
46. Carolina Herrera Perfumes: Flore, 212
47. Houbigant: Quelques Fleurs, Raffinée
48. Iceberg: Iceberg Twice Ice
49. Perfumes Isabell: Mandarin
50. Parfums Joop!: All About Eve
51. Joseph: Parfum de Jour
52. Donna Karan Beauty: Donna Karan New York
53. Parfums Kenzo: Parfum d'Eté
54. Calvin Klein: Obsession, Contradiction
55. Parfums Karl Lagerfeld: Sun, Moon, Stars
56. Lalique: Parfum Lalique, Nilang
57. Lancôme: Trésor, Poême
58. Parfums Lanvin: Arpège
59. Estée Lauder: Knowing, Pleasures, Dazzling Gold, Dazzling Silver
60. Ralph Lauren: Safari, Polo Sport Woman
61. Parfums Lelong: Indiscret
62. Parfums Lolita Lempicka: Lolita Lempicka
63. Parfums Loewe: Air Loewe
64. Jo Malone: Lime, Basil & Mandarin
65. Nicole MIller: Nicole Miller
66. Issey Miyake: L'Eau d'Issey
67. Molinard: Habanita, Molinard de Molinard
68. Parfums Montana: Parfum de Peau
69. Popy Moreni: Popy Moreni
70. Thierry Mugler: Angel
71. Parfums de Nicolaï: Sacrebleu
72. Rifat Ozbek: Ozbek
73. Jean Patou: Joy
74. Penhaligon's: Victorian Posy
75. La Perla: La Perla
76. Parfums Paloma Picasso: Mon Parfum, Tentations
77. Parfums Robert Piguet: Fracas
78. Parfums Paco Rabanne: XS pour Elle
79. Oscar de la Renta: Oscar, So de la Renta
80. Nina Ricci: L'Air du Temps, Nina, Deci Dela
81. Parfums Rochas: Femme, Madame Rochas, Alchimie
82. Royal Doulton: Doulton
83. Parfums Yves Saint Laurent: Paris, Opium, Yvresse
84. Jil Sander: Jil
85. Schiaparelli: Shocking, Zut
86. Shiseido: Feminité du Bois, Vocalise
87. Alfred Sung: Sung Forever
88. Elizabeth Taylor: White Diamonds
89. Tiffany & Co.: Tiffany
90. Parfums Trussardi: Trussardi Light Her
91. Parfums Ungaro: Diva
92. Parfums Valentino: Very Valentino
93. Van Cleef & Arpels: Van Cleef
94. Versace Profumi: V'E, Blonde
95. Madeleine Vionnet: Madeleine Vionnet
96. Vivian Westwood: Boudoir
97. Les Parfums Worth: Je Reviens

That's it! The author apologizes for the abridged list and explains that selection was necessary, but what I find interesting is that I have tested and reviewed most of these perfumes—and even own a fair number of them in vintage form! For me, this book is a keepsake text about how the world of perfumery once was, back when a perfume launch was an event, not a tweet. 

It would be possible to select a "Best of" from this entirely manageable group of perfumes, or even among all of the launches available at that time. In 2013? Good luck sniffing your way through the other 2000+ perfumes! And why bother, when it is obvious that the multi-mega-launchers are mostly doing Lego composition these days, lacking inspiration, insight, and often skill as well?

I read a dismissive review of Nigel Groom's 1999 book at Amazon. The angry reviewer denounced the work as "worthless". It is true that this is no longer a guide to perfume today. That point should be obvious from two words alone: Miss Dior. 

Back in 1999, Nigel Groom no doubt believed that he had produced a perfume guide. Instead, what we have here is an archaeological find!

The Question of the Osmothèque

Human beings have been perfuming themselves in one way or another for thousands of years. Yet still today, in the twenty-first century, perfumery has not been widely accepted by most people as a fine art. The best explanation for this neglect and the exclusion of perfumery from the history of the fine arts more generally is undoubtedly the sheer ephemerality of perfume.

Here today; gone tomorrow is a slogan which applies nowhere better than in the case of perfume. Even the names of what were said once to be classic perfumes are applied today to entirely new perfumes as a marketing strategy, thus effectively undermining the very possibility of perfumery's subsumption under the more general heading of the exalted and immortal beaux arts.

In the Big Black Bechstein in the Middle of the Room, I attempted (with limited success) to suggest that perfume is closer to music than it is to the other arts, in that it is intrinsically nonrepresentational in nature. I also find, although I have yet to develop this idea in writing, that perfume and music are similar to one another in terms of our experience of them, as each flows to us in an undulating stream of consciousness.

Just as it is impossible to attend equally to each and every note of a complex piece of music such as a fugue or symphony, it is impossible to attend equally to each and every note of a complex perfume as it unfurls throughout the course of its development. What we catch are snatches of the works, which is one of the reasons why they are so rich and can be experienced over and over again without ever risking boredom.

Setting to one side ontological issues and the psychology of music and perfume perception, and looking at the objects of perception instead, it becomes clear that there is a fundamental difference between the two cases. Nothing that any human being does today will ever change the basic fact that J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations are a masterpiece. Pianists may interpret the work in various ways, and we may or may not like those interpretations (I myself never liked Glenn Gould's grunts, may he rest in peace), but the work remains the same. In perfume, in contrast, the works said to be or to have been great eventually evaporate—quite literally—from the face of the earth.

Small wonder, then, that perfumers, along with their art, have not only been relegated to the margins of history, but their names have been inscribed in invisible ink. People have been perfuming themselves for thousands of years, but how many perfumers' names from more than a century ago does anyone know? We know that the old houses are old. Creed was established in 1760, Guerlain in 1828, and quite a cluster of names appeared on the scene in the early twentieth century: Chanel, Coty, Houbigant, et al. Lately the number of houses and perfumes has been increasing at a dizzying rate, chronicled admirably by Michael Edwards in his compendium Fragrances of the World (2012). But will any of these houses or perfumes be able to carve a permanent notch onto the tablet of human history?

Certainly in the small circles in which perfumers and perfumistas travel, much attention is paid to the originality and creativity of splendid perfumes, with credit given where credit is due to the otherwise unsung heroes of this art. Perfumers' names are explicitly associated with the perfumes of their creation by those “in the know,” but in the larger reality of which perfume collection (and obsession) represents only a minuscule subculture, for the vast majority of the consumers of perfumes, the name of the creator is completely unknown. They buy a bottle of perfume, which comes in a box, and generally speaking (with rare exceptions such as the house of Frédéric Malle) nowhere on either the bottle or the box is the perfumer's name anywhere to be found. This is the first clue that perfumery is more of a business than it is an art.

Houses, not perfumers, are credited when a consumer appreciates their wares. Thus Chanel is well-known even by the unwashed masses as a great creator of perfumes in part because they have produced the likes of Coco, Allure, Coco Mademoiselle, and above all Chanel no 5, but mostly because these have been made into household names by ubiquitous, relentless, mass cultural marketing campaigns.

How many people actually know that these perfumes were the works of  Jacques Polge and Ernest Beaux? I would surmise very few, even among self-styled perfumistas who regard themselves as more sophisticated than the average consumer. The truth is that there is no need to know the names of perfumers, and people concern themselves primarily with information relevant to their lives. If someone already knows that Chanel no 5 is and always will be her signature scent, then she may have neither the need nor the desire to find out who the perfumer responsible for its existence is. The question may never even arise in her mind. Her quest is over. She needs to know nothing more about her favorite perfume than where it can be found and purchased. She may even believe (erroneously) that the perfume was composed by Gabriel Chanel herself, just as many people appear to credit designers such as Marc Jacobs and Thierry Mugler with the perfumes bearing their name on the label.

Others, who have more of an eclectic approach to perfuming themselves may well wish to find out who created one of their favorite perfumes in order to be able to seek out others by the same nose. After a while, however, it may become clear that knowing the name will not necessarily be much help in finding other equally beloved perfumes, because every single creation of every single perfumer is unique and manifests a variety of influences beyond the sheer identity of the perfumer, including his or her budget on a particular project, the specifications of the client company, etc. Consider some of the more and less famous works by Maurice Roucel.

Every perfumer well known among the members of fragrance communities has produced one or more duds. Of course, the precise identity of the “duds” varies from person to person, depending above all on their tastes...

Is Amarige abhorrent? Or is it a masterpiece? While perfumistas may have strong opinions about their likes and dislikes, there does not seem to be any real consensus about which of the perfumes of Dominique Ropion are the masterpieces and which are the duds. It's fascinating actually, that so many people can agree that Dominique Ropion is a great perfumer, while vehemently disagreeing over the specific perfumes which validate that claim.

But, again, ask most any person you encounter on the street whether they know who Dominique Ropion is, and you will find that they do not. Some may confuse him with a vague media-generated image of Dominique de Villepin around the time when U.S. congressmen were pouring French wine down the gutters of Washington D.C. and eating “freedom fries”. In all likelihood, most people will frankly confess that they do not know who Dominique Ropion is and have never to their recollection even heard the name.

Unsung Heroes: Film Directors and Perfumers

In some ways, the situation of the perfumer is not unlike that of the film director, who often gets little if any credit for the product of his labor. Instead, most moviegoers attribute the greatness of a film to its stars, though in reality they have little to do with the nature of the artwork, serving only to interpret the lines written by the screenwriter and placed into a visual context by the director. There are of course sophisticated film lovers who are very familiar with the oeuvres of many different directors, but when ordinary people go to the cinema, they are not drawn by the director's name but by the movie stars.

Every rule has its exceptions, and I'd surmise that many of the people who go to see or rent a film by Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick (may he rest in peace) are doing so for the director, not for whoever the stars of a particular film by any of these iconic directors might be.

The ultimate exception to the rule may be Alfred Hitchcock, whose name became a household word through the massive exposure to him afforded to ordinary people through his many years on television as the host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In any case, the proportion of savvy movie viewers is likely to be as small as the proportion of savvy perfume users, it seems to me.

Perfumers are in some ways much worse off than film makers, however, because they lose all control over what is done with the perfumes of their creation once they become the property of a house. Reformulation is nothing if not the perversion by someone else of an artist's creation. The reasons for undertaking reformulation appear to be primarily economic, but there may be other considerations as well, including the desire on the part of a house's management team to leave their mark on or shape the quality of their offerings. I touched upon some of these topics in my earlier Reflections on Reformulation, but my point here is that the same thing does not generally speaking happen to the work of film directors.

A film is a film, and it stays that film for all time. Some people have protested the colorization of classic black and white films as a perversion of the original work, and reformulation may seem to be the same sort of thing. One significant difference is that the original black and white film upon which a recolorized version is based continues to exist and is not itself destroyed by the production of another version of the film. Not so in the case of perfume, where reformulations typically supplant the original perfume, usurping its name.

Consider Bernard Chant's Cabochard. A perfume bearing this name, still produced by Parfums Grès (pictured at right), has undergone significant change as a result of reformulation. It is said that Bernard Chant is a great perfumer. It is also said that he created Cabochard. But the vast majority of people who are familiar with this perfume today have only smelled the reformulation. And my hunch is that most of the people who refer to “the great Bernard Chant” have not smelled very many of his original perfumes. We accept on hearsay that he was great because he created perfumes which are said to have been great, though some of them are no longer produced while others have been drastically reformulated.

What is also interesting, however, in contrast to the case of film, is that, in the case of perfume, it is generally accepted as perfectly permissible to do the artistic equivalent of mangling a film and destroying the original. True, people may and do lament the reformulation of their formerly beloved perfume, but they do not, it seems, generally conceive of the injury as one committed against the perfumer but rather against the consumer. It would not be possible, I think, for a perfumer to initiate a successful civil lawsuit against a house for ruining his creation because the property in question belongs to the house.

This is a second clue that perfume is not regarded as a bona fide art in modern culture more generally, no matter how we perfumistas may wish to view things. The only perfumers who retain complete creative control over their works are those who also run their own houses. Perfumers such as Andy Tauer of Tauer Perfumes, for example, are at once the nose and the chair of their own company, and this ensures complete unanimity when it comes time to make tough decisions about discontinuations or reformulations.

I imagine that Andy Tauer, the artist, never proposes to himself, as CEO, to reformulate one of his own perfumes. His wearing of both of these hats simultaneously ensures that his works will not be degraded or destroyed through reformulation. He may of course for a variety of reasons decide to discontinue a perfume or, what is almost the same, to produce limited edition perfumes which literally cannot be reproduced beyond the original batch.

With mass market and designer perfumes, it seems that even sophisticated perfumistas are initially drawn to perfumes by the house label, and then only later do they learn who the creator of the perfume was. This may be in part simply because perfumers often work for many different houses, and there is no simple or obvious way to track the career trajectory of a given perfumer. He may work for L'Artisan Parfumeur and Van Cleef & Arpels, and found The Different Company before taking up permanent residence chez Hermès.

In fact, that appears to be precisely what Jean-Claude Ellena did—among many other things. Most everyone now knowledgeable about perfume is aware that nearly everything coming out of Hermès is the work of Ellena, just as everything coming out of Caron these days is the work of Richard Fraysse, and Thierry Wasser is the house perfumer for Guerlain. But in view of the vague and sketchy history of perfume up to now, all of this really adds up to the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, in the grand scheme of things, again, given the ephemeral nature of perfume.

Can the Osmothèque Legitimate Perfumery as an Art?

As some consumers have become more sophisticated about perfume, thanks in large part to online fragrance community websites such as Parfumo.net and Fragrantica.com, they seem to have contributed to the general feeling among practitioners in the industry that perfume deserves to be recognized as le huitième art. Enter L'Osmothèque, inaugurated in 1990 and currently directed by Patricia Nicolai of Parfums de Nicolai. According to the Osmothèque website:

Premier conservatoire de parfums de l'histoire, elle préserve ces créations si vulnérables et si précieuses de l’usure du temps, de la perte et de l’oubli. Collection vivante de parfums existants ou disparus, elle protège le patrimoine mondial de la parfumerie. 

[The first conservatory of perfume in history, the Osmothèque preserves these precious and vulnerable creations from the ravages of time, from loss, and from oblivion. A living collection of perfumes, both currently available and discontinued, the Osmothèque protects the heritage of perfumery.]


It may seem that it is straightforward to assimilate L'Osmothèque with one of the great visual arts museums, but my distinct impression is that it lies much closer to a Museum of Oenology, of which there are a surprising number in existence. Why is perfume closer to wine than to the visual arts? Because both are consumable and therefore exhaustible. It is possible to empty the last bottle drawn from the last vat of a discontinued perfume after which it is essentially extinct. The reason why vintage wines command such high prices and give rise to the likes of Rudy Kurniawan is because they, too, are exhaustible.

The Osmothèque Vault

The minds behind the Osmothèque appear keen to capture for posterity the great perfumes of the past, but it is unclear whether this can or even should be done. For one thing, unlike visual arts museums, the  direct experience of the perfumes preserved at the Osmothèque is not going to be possible for the general public. Yes, select invitees may be permitted to take a sniff here and there, but the whole reason why the perfumes are kept under argon gas is because they are subject to decomposition and evaporation. If L'Osmothèque began opening up its storage containers of famous perfumes from times past to the general public, they would not last long.

In fact, even if the vessels are carefully guarded and stored, it is inevitable that one day in the future their contents will be exhausted. This implies that, in the future, all talk of such extinct perfumes will be mere hearsay. At some point, every person on the planet who ever smelled the original perfume will actually be dead, and those who continue to talk about it will simply be parroting what others have told them. Indeed, this is the case for the early perfumes listed at the Osmothèque, which are intelligent, educated reconstructions by modern perfumers of works of the distant past. What are these reconstructions based upon? The written words of others.

This is, then, one of the dangers of a book written by people with very strong but idiosyncratic opinions who claim to be offering up a guide, as opposed to a sort of autobiographical chronicle of their own peculiar tastes. Call a book “The A-Z Guide,” and lots of ignorant and gullible people will parrot whatever it says, even with no knowledge of the objects to which the words refer. This is one of the many reasons why I believe that the caustic tone of so much of The Holey [sic] Book (see A Found Review) can only have a negative effect on the world of perfumery as a whole.

Perfume users looking for "expert guidance" may follow the lead of the Royal [ties] Coup[le] and slam perfumes which they've never even experienced and dismiss without so much as a sniff many works which in fact merit our consideration, as of course the perfumers who created them believed that they did. Ignorant readers may operate under the reasonable assumption, given the title of the book, that the authors are actually experts about something beyond their own personal tastes and beliefs.

One problem I see with the Osmothèque is that it promotes this same notion, that self-proclaimed aesthetic experts really are experts, when in fact perfume perception is highly subjective (Everything you've heard and read about perfume is true!), which implies that such "perfume pundits" are really just people with particular likes and dislikes. It's one thing to be an expert about the science of olfaction and quite another to be an “aesthetic expert” about perfume—whatever that is supposed to mean. Even worse, the whole concept of institutional preservation of select perfumes holds the potential for corporate cooption.

I recall reading an announcement by Chandler Burr of his new position as curator of the Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. One of the first things he mentioned was that funding was being provided by Estée Lauder, a company which obviously has a lot at stake financially in the identification of some of its and its subsidiaries' perfumes as genuine masterpieces.

Now, the arts have always had their patrons, of course. But the difference in this case as, say, from that of the visual and literary arts, which receive a great deal of public funding, is that in order for legislators to fund such an undertaking, they would need first to believe that perfumery is an art. It's a chicken-egg problem or, if you like, a catch-22. Because perfumery is not generally regarded as an art by average people (as opposed to perfumers and perfumistas), it cannot receive the sort of public funding enjoyed by the established arts. This leaves primarily corporations to foot the bill, but they obviously have a very self-interested reason in seeing to it that the products of their making receive stamps of approval from "the experts".

On the very face of it, there would seem to be the potential for deep conflict of interest in this structure, with a perfumer as the curator and the institution being funded, I presume, by some of the houses. It seems to me rather like the situation with a Museum of Oenology underwritten by Robert Mondavi or some other winemaking giant. These apparently truth-seeking institutions may start to seem more like just another promotional tool rather than an apparatus for celebrating the great perfumes of the past. Perfumery as it has developed in human societies, and in the form to which we are granted access, is a business. There may be artists working behind the scenes, but the real power at the houses lies elsewhere.

In the end, rather than attempting to turn perfume into something which it is not and could never be, perhaps we should instead celebrate this art form's essential ephemerality. Just as the value of travel inheres primarily in the experience, and not in the souvenirs and snapshots or videos which one may gather along the way, perhaps we should focus more upon the precious beauty of the fleeting moments of pleasure which perfume can bring to us, and worry less about how to bottle that experience for all time.

Flankers, Twitter, and the Fall of Western Civilization

Emilio Pucci Vivara (2007)

It has become redundant to the point of banality to observe how much the world has changed since the advent of the internet. The way we write (cut and paste), the way we socialize (Facebook, email, text messaging and Twitter), and even the way we think (in bullet-pointed lists) have all been changed irrevocably by the military-industrial complex's only bona fide gift to humanity: the personal computer. Sure, computers were designed in order be able to direct weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles to home in on their unsuspecting targets in lands far away, but that did not prevent them from being used for less nocent purposes as well, for which we have capitalism, too, to thank.

Old fogies lament the imminent disappearance of the book, while young people revel in the vast array of new outlets for their creative energies made possible by computer technology. But everyone, young and old alike, has been changed by the computer age. Remember those stalwart figures (with stock holdings in the ill-fated USPS?) who claimed that they would never use e-mail? Where are they now? Well, if they're still alive, you can be sure that they are receiving and paying bills online, in addition to clicking on greeting card links and either reading or deleting all of those lame forwarded jokes preceded by lengthy headers.

Similarly, people who were saddened by the disappearance of, first, LPs (long-playing record albums), then, cassette tapes, and now CDs (compact discs) have simply failed to grasp the abundant wonderfulness of being able to store thousands of different musical works on an ipod. The days of scratched and broken records are now forever gone.

Movies, too, have undergone a radical transformation. First, there were only movie reels screened at theaters. Then, long, long ago, the battle between Betamax and VHS tapes was won by the latter, only to be subsequently replaced by DVDs (digital video discs). Today, visual media are being transmitted more and more through wireless streaming onto screens the size of walls in our humble abodes.

This latest development completely erases any remaining vestige of allure which once upon a time motivated us to get dressed and leave the comfort of our couch to journey out into the night in order to sit in a multiplex cinema and listen to rude people talk and smokers cough while trying to watch a movie which usually, being first-run, was not worth watching anyway.

Whether one likes the feel of books or the gleam of an LP, one can scarcely deny that the capacity to carry one's entire library of media with oneself all over the world on a hand-held device constitutes an advance of sorts. So many of these materials—texts, music, and video images—are immediately accessible for free, that there is not even that much need to own such things anymore. Of course, we all need our hand-held devices of preference, whether netbook, i-pad, Kindle, Nook, i-pod, i-phone, or (most likely) some union of the above. But even all of them together would not exceed the volume capacity of a small drawer.

Certainly the people who inhabit tiny studio apartments in Manhattan have been aided by the near obsolescence of the physical book, the physical music track, and the physical movie. Yes, it has finally become possible to realize their sad quest to live a domestic life including family and pets within a space spanning 300 sq ft.

What could be wrong with any of this?

One aspect of this twenty-first-century world which seems to me to be undergoing a devolution rather than an improvement is the value of text. Everyone today is a writer: it is a part of being a person in society at this point. People today interact using written words with great frequency across many different platforms.

Perhaps we should be glad that literacy is becoming more and more a requirement of personhood as computers spread from First to Third World countries. Humanity, it might seem, on the whole, is being elevated by the computer age, which requires us to be able to exercise our written language capacity in situations which formerly called for spoken words. In fact, today even illiterate persons can capture their version of history for posterity by speaking into the microphone of a computer equipped with Dragon software. The question, however, remains: Will anyone ever read the text thus transcribed?

Yes, the downside of all of this prodigious production of text is a veritable bloating of the verbal universe. There are so many words being written by so many people that it has become exceedingly difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff. We have begun to resort to and indeed depend upon social media measures of popularity in determining which among this quasi-infinitude of texts merit our attention.

Part of this transformation has involved an unabashed egocentrism, involving people asking one another to “like” them on Facebook or to “follow” them on Twitter. Regrettably, persons whose calling it might have been in the twentieth century to be a writer, may now find themselves spending vastly more time on public relations and marketing activities than on writing itself. Would-be writers may thereby sabotage themselves by focusing too obsessively upon how to prove that they are not merely one among millions of bloggers but actual writers. By expending their energy and the best hours of their day on self-promotion, they may end by becoming precisely what they aimed to avoid.

One always hopes, of course, that the cream will rise naturally to the top, but what if no one can find the tiny dots of cream floating atop this vast ocean of verbiage? The problem for writers today is that they are no longer competing so much with writers as with companies who use the very same media for peddling their wares.

Yes, the “social media” originally intended to help people “connect” with one another, and soon thereafter touted by some as a boon for humanity, have been progressively capitalized, and are being used more and more by companies and organizations with profit-making agendas. If you click “like” for any product or store, your Facebook friends will shortly thereafter learn about this fact, for it will appear as an advertisement on their profile.

Worse, when you go to a site which has been “liked” by your friends, their names will be used as an advertisement at that site to you and all of their other friends (who are only one friend removed and therefore likely to be similar to you), whether they had any idea that this was going to happen or not.

People are probably beginning to catch on to how their seemingly innocent clicking of “like” to enter a contest for a free give-away leads directly to their open-ended—indeed, infinite (barring future legislation...)—endorsement of the company and its products. Still, many seem not to be very bothered by any of this at all. It's all a big, fun, “FB Friend”-ly, “like”-able (and not dis-”like”able) connected world! Pass the Prozac (or one of its SSRI [selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor] successors and/or add-ons), log on, and tune out from physical reality while you track the number of “likes” you received on your Facebook comments on other virtual people's comments since the last time you logged on.

Better yet, carry your wireless mobile device with you wherever you go and Twitter to your fawning followers throughout the day so that they will feel connected with you as you peruse the aisles at the grocery store, stop for a bite to eat, or wait fuming in a traffic jam. Boredom and loneliness are clearly things of the past, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, which keep us connected potentially 24/7 to anyone who regards us as worthy of their followership. (I, of course, would never have as a follower anyone willing to follow me.)

Do I detect a slight look of consternation in the reader's eyes? What in the world does any of this have to do with perfume? you may well be wondering. Quite a lot, it will emerge very soon.

Facebook and Twitter may seem on their surface to be harmless and free, but they have hidden costs, as we shall shortly see. Some of these costs are already fairly well known. The misfortunes which have befallen some persons imprudent enough to publish on the internet information of a personal or confidential nature (thought to be shared only among select Facebook Friends, perhaps in a closed group turned open by a careless administrator) have been used as cautionary tales to those who would trash their boss or their former roommates on the very public world wide web.

I am interested in a different sort of effect, one which heretofore appears not to have been recognized by anyone else. I openly aver that the question which I would like to present for your consideration today, my fellow fragrant travelers, may seem initially preposterous. Nonetheless, I am confident that, on reflection, you will come ultimately to agree that, like Prozac and the other SSRIs, social media, too, may have unforeseen and untoward consequences, specifically, in the case of Twitter, for the world of perfumery.

Does Twitter Cause Flankers?

I am aware that this question has probably not flittered through any of your minds before. What in the world does Twitter have to do with flankers? inquiring minds may well want to know. And I do not deny the manifest reasonableness of the question, because few, if any, people have to date taken note of the Twitter-Flanker connection which I propose here to illuminate.

Many perfumistas have lamented the massive explosion of perfume flankers launched in the twenty-first century. Is it a mere coincidence that Twitter, too, has grown exponentially over the course of the very same few years? I think not.

Flankers and limited-edition releases (often of the same perfume or a tweaked version in a newly decorated bottle) are creatures of the twenty-first century. Michael Edwards, author of Fragrances of the World—which, by the way, is actually a genuine guide to perfume—reports these dramatic changes over the past two decades: there were “1200 new launches in 2011, compared with 372 launches in 2001 and just 76 in 1991.”

The 28th edition of Fragrances of the World, to appear in 2012

According to Edwards, “In 1991, no one had really heard of limited-edition scents or ‘flankers’, while in 2001 there were 32 limited editions and 52 flankers. Those numbers have now sky-rocketed to 236 limited-edition scents and 197 flankers in 2011.”

Part of the disparity in the numbers can be explained by the increased tendency toward simultaneous multiple launches, which have become more and more common over the course of the past decade. Consider the Dolce & Gabbana Anthology simultaneous release of five new perfumes in 2009: 

D&G Anthology (2009)

The original five perfumes launched in 2009 were: Le Bateleur 1, L'Impératrice 3, L'Amoureux 6,  La Roue de la Fortune 10, and La Lune 19. These were then followed up upon by new members to the series, La Force 11 (also in 2009), La Tempérance 14 (2011), Le Fou 21 (2011), and L'Empéreur 4 (2012). Are any of these perfumes flankers? Not in the strict sense, but they are created in the same spirit: quick and easy releases in readily identifiable bottles which capitalize on the success of earlier releases and all of those which look the same. The cryptic digit labeling system of these perfumes suggests that new series members bearing the numbers 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 20 may be imminent!

In any case, the data seems beyond dispute: flankers and serial releases are a twenty-first-century phenomenon. Twitter, having been created only in 2006, is undeniably a full-fledged twenty-first-century phenomenon. Correlation or causality? I ask most sincerely. And I am persuaded that the reader will come over to my side having once ruminated upon the essential nature of a Tweet.

A Tweet is a tiny, 140-character-maximum-length message. What does it convey? It conveys news. Something new has happened in the world to someone (the Tweeter or Twit) somewhere, who decides to report this event in a Tweet to his or her followers.

Perhaps he bought a new car, or she a pair of shoes. Perhaps a happy couple is meeting to dine at a new restaurant or to attend an art exposition and one or both of them wish to share this news with their friends. The keyword common to every single Tweet ever Twittered by any Twitterer (or Twit) is: NEW.

Now, we have considered above how companies have elbowed their way into the social media landscape to become our “friends” and fearless leaders (when we “follow” them) through a variety of machinations usually involving special offers and/or discounts, also known as “bribes”.

But these companies do not buy new cars and shoes or eat at new restaurants or attend art exhibitions. No, companies,  no matter how well they may masquerade themselves as our friends, in reality, have only one thing to tweet: they have something new which they would like you to buy.

It may be difficult to face the music, but the truth is that perfume companies are no exception to this general rule. The launch of a new product, and in the case of perfume houses, a new perfume, is the content of a meaningful Tweet, from the perspective of the company itself, a profit-seeking organization.

I see in my mind's eye the readers in my midst in the grip of an “ah-ha” moment. Yes, my fellow fragrant travelers, I contend that Twitter is indeed, against all appearances and expectations, the ultimate cause of what may be best described as Flanker Madness. Make no mistake: Twitter has single-handedly generated such a rapid proliferation of perfume launches that the vast majority of perfumes being produced at this point in history are either flankers or quasi-flankers, most of which are hastily composed and poured into the bottles of their predecessors in order to able to announce, in a Tweet, to the followers of the house, that there is news.

Does the Success of Twitter Spell Disaster for Perfumery?

The Flanker folie has ramified beyond the realm of mainstream houses to infect niche houses as well. Hence the ever-more frequent specter of launches by niche houses of entire series of new perfumes. No, they are not flankers in the strict sense of the word, but they do appear to be produced under a new principle guiding perfumers today which has eclipsed the former telos of beauty and art. This new guiding principle is, stated succinctly: “Safety in numbers”.

The examples of these multi-launches are too numerous to enumerate, and I should clarify that I am quite fond of a few select creations of many different houses, but the vast majority of niche launches have about as much value as one should expect something to have which was created in one-tenth of the time that perfumers used to take in creating a single new perfume.

Some of the most prolific houses established in the twenty-first century, Montale, Bond no. 9, Keiko Mecheri, Boadicea the Victorious, to name a few from an ever-expanding group of multi-launchers, now boast perfume lists whose numbers approach the triple-digit mark.

Fine, you may say: what's wrong with that? In order to illustrate the problem here, let us pause to reflect for a moment on what has happened to text in the twenty-first century. In the case of the text explosion occasioned by the advent of the internet, the value of each individual text is diminished by its relative obscurity vis-à-vis all of the rest, and all the more because writers themselves are spending less time on their craft and more on public relations.

I contend that, in the case of perfumery, too, the bloating of the perfume universe with meaningless flankers and the use of social media to increase sales and thereby dictate taste (because most consumers tend to wear what they buy, and once they buy a perfume, they don't need another) has a similar effect.

The veritable explosion of new launches, both mainstream and niche, virtually guarantees that quality will suffer, for perfumers themselves, like writers, are fighting to survive in a world which rewards quick and frequent releases. This means that perfumers, too, are being changed by the need to alter their behavior in response to the demands placed upon them by the capitalized social media.

As perfumes become more and more subjected to the selection processes shaping the market through social media measures, perfumers, too, may find themselves preoccupied more and more with public relations and self-promotion than with the art of perfume. What is worse, it is very difficult to see how this vicious spiral, now well underway, might ever be called to a halt. Perfume houses large and small, mainstream and niche, have heeded the cry “Tweet or die” in their endeavor to survive in the ever-more competitive company-colonized social-media market today.

What appears to have emerged out of all of this chaos is, regrettably, a now fairly well-established Lego perfumery movement, as I have come to label the phenomenon. Lego perfumery involves the piecing together of new perfumes using pre-constructed units or modules, what are, in effect, accord building blocks. Will Lego perfumery prevail in the age of Twitter, and finally render obsolete the painstaking process of composing a classic perfume from scratch over a period of years by an olfactory artist? This is my concern.

So there you have it, my identification and indictment of the primary culprit behind the current crisis in perfumery, which appears to be careering ever more recklessly toward triviality, having yet even to establish itself in the eyes of the masses as a legitimate art in the first place. I rest my case, and call upon you, my fellow fragrant travelers, to illuminate the errors in my argument, if any, as I am unable to discern them myself.

Pray tell: where have I gone astray?