Entry #12: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Phenomenology, Phenomenological

After epistemology, phenomenology may be one of the most reviled philosophical terms. My distinct impression is that people dislike the word phenomenological as well. Why? Because nearly every time I use it, I am advised by someone or other not to. 

Most people know that the plural of phenomenon is phenomena. but when one uses the word phenomenological, eyes are likely to glaze over. It seems to be rather like saying (**^&^#^%#$@%$@%$@%$@%$@%! As in the case of utilitarianism, a fairly ordinary term, phenomenon, has been appropriated and modified by philosophers (especially Husserl, but Hegel, too, used phenomenology in an idiosyncratic way) to refer to a specific approach to knowledge. I used this word in a comment on the previous entry, so I figured that I'd better define it. 

Phenomenon in the vernacular means more or less the same as thing, with a connotation of being special in one way or another. Maybe that's how the word phenomenal came to mean something like extraordinary.

The term phenomenology refers to the examination of direct experience, the data as they present themselves to one's senses, without any knowledge of the objects which generate the data. Imagine looking at a book, without knowing that it's a book. It's just an object with a parallelopiped structure from various angles. How do you process this image? What can you learn from the direct experience of the image before your eyes?

In an upcoming post, I intend to give a better idea of what phenomenology is, but for the purposes of this entry, I'd simply like to observe that perfume would seem to offer a splendid opportunity—in fact, ideal—for phenomenological analysis, particularly when one samples blind, without knowledge of the house, the nose, the notes, or anything "external", which a phenomenologist would say should be "bracketed". 

If we can experience a perfume as a thing in itself, the manner in which we describe it will still, invariably, relate back to our idiosyncratic history (what we have experienced before), including our knowledge of other perfumes. If perfume is one of the best candidates for phenomenological analysis, yet even it poses problems—can you really smell aldehydes without thinking of Chanel  no 5?—this may signal that the project of phenomenology is doomed. Or perhaps it is just a bit too ambitious. Perhaps we can still learn from attempting phenomenological analysis of experience, even if it may not be possible to fully "bracket" all of our background knowledge.

Can you describe a perfume in terms of pure experience? Or must it always be mediated by a bunch of other theories, including knowledge of other perfumes? 

What say you, my fragrant friends?

Is this Creed a Fake? An essay in applied epistemology

A while back, I purchased a couple of Creed perfumes from an online discount emporium. I knew that they had a liberal return policy, so in the event that I received fakes, I'd be able to return them for a full refund. I had bought Creeds from discounters in the past with extraordinarily good luck. I base this claim on the fact that I tested nearly the entire set of Creed perfumes about three years ago using house-prepared vials provided by an officially authorized Creed dealer. I wrote reviews at that time, and so when my experience matched my reviews, and the perfumes also proved to have excellent longevity and smell natural, I was confident that they were authentic. Needless to say, I was delighted in those cases to have saved a wad of cash by taking a chance on acquiring those bottles from unauthorized dealers.

 Note the peridot green color!

This more recent time, however, I may not have been so lucky. I spoke with a woman at Creed headquarters at length regarding the purchase, as I had also in the past about various issues regarding their distribution and the problem of fakes. Creed is extremely helpful and understanding about this problem and they go out of their way to take the time to talk to consumers of their perfumes—whether or not they are customers of the boutique itself. 

The people at Creed know very well that many of us who wish to own Creed perfumes would also love to be able to save $100 or even $200 a bottle, if possible. But is it possible in a world rife with Creed fakes? that is the question, my fragrant friends. Of course, many consumers believe that genuine Creeds can be had for significantly less than MSRP, as evidenced by the amazing fact that, despite countless "Creed fake" threads at Dnotes, all of which relay basically the same story over and over again, people continue to acquire Creed bottles from e-bay. 

As a matter of fact, even the Creed staff avers that it is possible to obtain genuine Creed perfumes from unauthorized dealers. The problem, they are swift to warn, is that there is no guarantee, as there is when one purchases from an officially authorized Creed dealer. One way for real Creed perfumes to show up at discounters is when an authorized dealer closes up shop for one reason or another (usually going out of business), and they sell off their entire stock in one big lot. 

The structure of the cap and spray mechanism appear to be genuine

The problem, of course, is that discounters obtain bottles by any and all other means as well, and this means that it's always a gamble. Discounters, too, hope to peddle only genuine wares, but because there is not a direct and documentable path from the provider back to the producer of the perfumes, there is no way to prevent fakes being slipped into the system now and then. For most perfumes, this is not a problem, since no one would bother to invest the time and energy needed to produce a plausible fake because it would not be profitable enough. Only for expensive perfumes such as Creed does this make the enterprise worth the criminal's effort and guile. 

The lot numbers engraved on the bottle and printed on the box match

The good news is that, unlike ebay peddlers, discounters tend not to be fly-by-night ventures but reputable businesses working hard to build and maintain a loyal clientele. This is why when customers are dissatisfied, the store permits them to return the merchandise, and the store even pays the postage for the return, provided that there is a legitimate reason for the disgruntled consumers' concern.

I believe that I may have received a fake bottle of Tabarome, which for that reason I returned (once a good friend of mine had taken these photos for me). What is the evidence? skeptical minds are already asking. What are the key signs of a fake Creed? Having looked into this matter a few times before, I am familiar with the tell-tale signs of egregious fakes, and many of them are missing in this case. Here is what is as it should be:

1. There are no misspellings of the text on either the box or the folio. 

2. The cardboard of the box has the raised impressions with the Creed logo. 

3. The lot number etched in the bottom edge of the glass matches the lot number on the label affixed to the bottom of the box. 

4. The inner sprayer is made of white plastic and is a separate piece from the outer sprayer. 

5. The cap has a separate inner plastic insert, and the crown insignia is on a separate piece from the rest of the outer cap.

6. The white calling card included in the box appears to be genuine, as it is empirically indistinguishable from the ones included with bottles which I am confident contain authentic Creed perfume.

Folio and Calling Card included in the box

So far, so good. Unfortunately, there are a few outstanding problems. If this bottle is a fake, it is not an egregious one, but is it a fake after all?

Let us list the evidence, and then consider the various explanations for the evidence. Are there other ways to explain what I identified as disparities? I found problems with each of these:


1. The scent 

2. The color of the liquid

3. The box top

4. The folio

5. The front of the box

6. The marbled quality of the plastic inner layer of the cap.

The Scent

The moment I sprayed on the liquid from this bottle, the first word which came out of my mouth was: aromachemicals. The scent smacked decidedly of the current craze among both designer and niche perfumers for the use of some combination of iso-E-super and ambroxan and what-not, and I do not like it at all. Would I want to wear this perfume? In a word: No.

Why in the world did she buy it? inquiring minds are now pondering. The answer is found in the review which I penned at Fragrantica on May 7, 2010:

I am beginning to wonder whether I might have been a chain smoker in a past life, as I find myself delighted by every fragrance in which tobacco plays a central role, and especially in savory presentations. Part of my excitement may be due to the relative dearth of the tobacco note in women's perfume, and especially outside gourmand territory. 

Creed TABAROME is a delectable tobacco composition with no sweetness, no ashiness, and no dirtiness. This is not the smell of cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. TABAROME is clean, wet, green, freshly harvested piles of tobacco leaves, beautifully framed by a few gentle aromatics. Fresh tea leaves are present as well, along with sandalwood, vetiver and musk, serving to anchor the composition and impart good longevity and medium sillage. 

I do not believe that TABAROME is suited only for men, nor that this is an "old school", "landed gentry" frag. I find this sumptuous in the way in which so many patchouli perfumes are--the clean ones, not the dark, dirty ones.  

Perhaps tobacco land owners should abandon their doomed projects to create new smokers and instead divert their energies, resources and time to the perfume industry. I honestly believe that now that patchouli has achieved market saturation, tobacco could be the new patchouli...

Highly recommended. On my wish list, too!

So there you have it. Why I bought—or tried to buy—a bottle of Tabarome. My experience of the liquid in the bottle in question unfortunately bore no relation to the experience relayed in the above review. 

Now, there are several possible explanations for the disparity. Perhaps in my first encounter with Creed Tabarome I was succumbing to the power of suggestion. Perhaps I imagined the scent of tobacco in my original testing of a house-sourced vial. But why, then, would I not similarly conjure up the scent of tobacco in this instance as well? I suppose that it is possible that I was already skeptical, having purchased the bottle from a discounter. 

What if this creation has been reformulated? Perhaps I smelled another scent because the name Tabarome is now being attached to a different perfume. Or perhaps the disparity can be explained by the natural variations in natural ingredients, often cited in explaining inconsistencies especially in different batches of perfumes built from natural materials. 

The problem with that explanation is that the substance in this bottle of Tabarome did not smell natural to me at all. I smelled none of the wonderful notes of what I believed earlier to have been Tabarome. I smelled aromachemicals. Is it possible that in the interim I developed a hypersensitivity to aromachemicals having encountered them in some many perfumes of late? Perhaps I did not smell the ginger and the tobacco and the other notes in this batch of Tabarome because my nose was distracted by the aromachemicals which perhaps were being used now in place of some of the former materials.

Could the disparity be explained by a change in taste? I do not believe so, because I detected none of the notes present in the earlier testing. Before, I was able easily to identify the tobacco note. It's not that I detected tobacco in this batch and did not like it. No, I did not detect it at all!

The Color

Am I imagining this, or is this the only bottle of Tabarome pictured on the entire World Wide Web which is peridot green? I've googled and googled, and looked at everyone's images, and the liquid in only this bottle is a wacky hue of green! What can this mean? Could this radical difference in color be explained by a particularly verdant crop of tobacco? Needless to say, I'm skeptical, given that I smelled no tobacco but only aromachemicals here.

The Box top

Every single box of Creed which I own and have ever seen uses all caps for the text on the box top. This one uses lower case. Was this due to a deviant designer who happened to be working at the time of the production of the box housing this particular bottle of "Tabarome"? Are there other boxes around with lower-case text, and I simply have never encountered them? If I owned more Creed perfumes, would I encounter this variant again? Can anyone out there speak to this question? Have you a box with lower-case writing on the top? If so, are you sure that yours is authentic Creed? How is it that you know?

Only one of these boxes (in the lower left-hand quadrant)
uses lower case for the list of historical figures who wore Creed perfume.
The other boxes all use all caps 

The Folio

The informational folio included with all of my other Creed perfumes has four pages, in multiple languages. This one? A single page in English, with no text on the backside and no other languages. 

Page 1 of two different folios: the one on the left is only in English;
the one on the right offers the text in English, French, Italian, and German 
on the subsequent pages (missing from the dubious Tabarome folio)

Page 2 of the dubious Tabarome folio; Page 2-3 of an authentic Creed folio

There is no text on the backside (page 2) of the dubious Tabarome folio;
there is text on the backside (page 4) of the authentic Creed folio

I do not believe that the severely abridged folio alone proves that the Tabarome is fake. But it requires some imagination to explain why the text is only the first page of the four-page authentic folio. Could it be a printer error? Books are sometimes printed with pages in the wrong order or missing pages, or even with the pages of a completely different book interpolated. Could something bizarre like that have happened here? Is it plausible that a fake-Creed producer would make this sort of mistake, when it seems one of the easiest parts of the production to mimic?

The Front of the Box

The issues which I found on the front of the box are subtle, but perhaps important. First, the word père appears to be split in two, as though the person setting the text did not know French and so thought that there were two words: pè and re.

père  or pè and re ???

The second issue is the missing e next to 120ml. This is present on all of my other boxes. However, there is a possible problem. This Tabarome was the only 120ml bottle box ever in my possession. Could it be that the 120ml bottle box does not have that symbol for a reason? I am skeptical, especially because my 250ml bottle of Jasmin Impératrice Eugénie (which is undeniably authentic) does display that symbol next to the volume. 

a suspiciously missing e

Again, the possibilities proliferate. Could this, too, have been a printer's error on a specific lot of boxes? The raised insignia looks perfectly in order. The cardboard is clearly the same. Even the silver ink matches. Could these variations be the work of an incompetent typesetter, perhaps?

The Inner Cap

The inner cap is a separate piece from the outer cap, which seems genuine because the crown insignia is also separate. However, there is a problem:  the inner cap exhibits a marbled quality absent from every other Creed cap I've seen. 

Is this marbled quality common in Creed caps?
Have I just happened on homogeneous plastic in my experience with genuine Creeds in the past? 

This, too, could be some sort of fluke. Or perhaps I simply have not looked at a wide enough range of Creed caps. Or perhaps, again, there are significant differences in the case of 120ml bottles. But wait: aren't the caps the very same size???? Needless to say, I am confused.

Is this a fake? Who knows? Does it even matter? I only knew in this case what I needed to know: that I did not like this perfume and would not use 120 mls of it in even 120 years.

Implications

Perhaps all of the deviations can be explained somehow. Perhaps the dubious Tabarome was a real Creed perfume. But it is also quite possible that the perfume in the bottle was not  genuine Creed perfume. I've read many, many dismissive reviews of Tabarome. Does this mean that the perfume itself is bad? Or that fakes such as mine are rife? I suspect that the latter is the best explanation of the poor (sometimes scathing) reviews, given that there is a handful of glowing reviews brim with praise. My suspicion is that the bottle I returned is now in the hands of some other perfumista who purchased it in the hope of receiving a genuine Creed for a fraction of MSRP. It is even possible that a decanter acquired this or another bottle like it, and by divvying it up into tiny (grossly overpriced) samples, has sown falsehood and deception far and wide.

Now I'd like to open up the floor. Come forth Creed fans and foes! Share your Creed fake stories. If you are a Creed detractor, ask yourself whether you can trace the source of your juice back to the Creed boutique or headquarters. If not, I need to know whether you believe that there is some reason why you, too, might not have been testing a bogus dupe when you took Creed to task for producing a "boring, synthetic, derivative, and overpriced excuse for a niche perfume." 

It's time to come clean, my friends. Please share your epistemological trials and tribulations. Or explain why you should be free from the above sorts of concerns.

Entry #3: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Skepticism and Skeptics

The word skeptic is used quite a lot in a loose way to refer to someone who harbors doubts about a particular question or subject matter. In philosophy, skeptic and skepticism refer more specifically to a type of epistemological doubt. Skeptics are people who start out as epistemologists, attempting to determine the conditions and extent of our knowledge, but they end by concluding that the answers to the following questions are rather dim: 

What do we know? Diddly.

How do we know? We don't.

Can we know? No.

Do we know anything at all? No.

What is truly fascinating about skepticism is that it knows (pardon the pun) no bounds. It is possible even to be a skeptic about skepticism! So a consistent skeptic ultimately ends up in a quandary: how does he know that he does not know?

Socrates appears to have been a skeptic, who did not espouse any positive views of his own about the world, but famously exhorted people to Know thyself. When it came to matters transcending the self, Socrates was all questions and no answers, and this really annoyed his contemporaries, who in the end sentenced him to death for his irritating habit of walking around the streets of Athens and badgering people with questions until they revealed the truth: that they had no idea what they were talking about.

Socrates revealed this truth to his interlocutors by catching them in contradictions. It cannot be the case both that p and that not-p (where p is any proposition), but when Socrates persisted in his questioning, he invariably found that the people with whom he conversed contradicted themselves, thus demonstrating that, despite their sophisticated airs and alleged expertise and experience, reality and appearance diverged.

Are there skeptics in the world of perfume? Of course. One of the most common examples is the Creed skeptic, who denies that the house of Creed really is all that it purports to be. To the Creed skeptic, a Creed skeptic skeptic (such as Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos) retorts: how do you know that Creed is a sham? 

 
Is a skeptic about Creed skeptics a true believer? Or does he simply deny that the grounds for Creed skepticism are sound? I encourage you to read some of the many excellent pieces on these matters over at From Pyrgos.

We'll pick up tomorrow where we left off, with the skeptic's mortal enemy: the metaphysician!

Entry #2: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Epistemology

The word epistemology means theory of knowledge or the study of knowledge. This branch of philosophy is concerned with the most fundamental of questions: What do we know? How do we know? Can we know? Do we know anything at all?

Naturally one of the first questions to be addressed by epistemologists (the philosophers who spend their time primarily on questions of knowledge) is simply this: 

What is knowledge? 

According to one orthodox answer to this question, knowledge is justified true belief. That may sound complicated, but it's really just common sense. If I know that the perfume which I just donned after my bath is Clinique Aromatics Elixir, then presumably it is true that I just donned Clinique Aromatics Elixir, and I do in fact believe that to be the case. Furthermore, I must be justified in believing that the perfume in the bottle which I just sprayed on is indeed Clinique Aromatics Elixir. Are there any reasons for doubting any of this?

Or to turn the question on its head: What precisely are my grounds for believing that the perfume which I just donned is Aromatics Elixir? It certainly seems reasonable that the brown liquid inside this frosted glass bottle is Aromatics Elixir. I did not buy my bottle from an ebay hawk, who in an effort to maximize profit may have decanted half the liquid and refilled the vessel with anti-freeze, adjusting the color back to that of the original perfume by adding some dye. 

Of course, it's possible that some perverse factory employee of the Clinique company pulled a practical joke such that an entire batch of what was bottled as Aromatics Elixir was in fact a completely different perfume. It's also possible that an incompetent employee simply made a big fat mistake, say, by confusing the various recipes in the factory fragrance book, and combining the ingredients needed to produce Clinique Happy instead of Aromatics Elixir.

Nonetheless, I feel justified in my belief that the perfume which I donned after my bath is not Clinique Happy, because happily it does not smell like that fragrance. In fact, the perfume wafting up my décolleté smells exactly like Aromatics Elixir! 

There is still a problem, however: my alleged knowledge of what Aromatics Elixir smells like derives solely from the bottles in my collection (one was produced in the United States, the other in Switzerland). If those bottles do not contain Aromatics Elixir, though I believe that they do, I could still be wrong. They both open with a bitter and intense chamomile but eventually dry down to oakmoss-patchouli bliss.

Now, of course, the astute reader is wondering about the probability that the liquids in the two different bottles, produced in entirely different countries, could possibly both be erroneously filled with some substance other than Aromatics Elixir—and the same one, at that! To my surprise, the color of the liquids in the two bottles is not at all the same—one seems more yellow, the other much more brown—but the scent seems quite similar, especially by the drydown. 

Would it not take a conspiracy of grand proportion for both of these bottles to be filled with any perfume other than Aromatics Elixir, even though empirically speaking they are in fact quite distinct? Can we not explain the difference in color by factors such as the particular crop of patchouli used in the two distinct batches? 

I think that you can see where all of this is leading. Epistemologists really do spend time on all of the various ways in which we can be mistaken in our beliefs. If knowledge is justified true belief, then when we are mistaken in our beliefs, we lack knowledge. Perhaps it should be obvious why epistemologists have so few friends and are hated above all by people whose beliefs are grounded in faith. 

There are so many very different ways in which we might be mistaken that after thinking about these questions for a while, one may simply capitulate to skepticism. But that's tomorrow's word, so stay tuned, especially since Creed may be mentioned...

Intro and Entry #1: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Introduction

My mother is fond of reminding me every several months or so that "normal people don't use words like epistemology and phenomenology." She is an intelligent woman with a graduate degree in political science, so I feel that she's not just picking on me. The last time she mentioned this, she adduced as further evidence of the truth of her claim that when she asked her husband, an attorney (not my father, who is an engineer) whether he knew what the word epistemology means, he shrugged his shoulders and replied, "No."

Needless to say, I've been doing some soul searching and have decided that it's time for me to start defining my terms. I realize that the salon de parfum has been in existence now for more than fifteen months, but, as they say: Better late than never! If my highly educated parents don't even know what epistemology means, can I really expect even astute perfumistas to know what I am talking about when I pepper my texts with such terms as ontology, metaphysics, phenomenology, and the like? 

Effective right now, I am building a philosophical lexicon for ready reference by visitors to the salon de parfum who wish to debate deep issues about perfume but have no idea what I am talking about. This will take me a bit of time to complete, so I'm going to approach this as a blogger, which you may have noticed is not really my style. I prefer to post essays, but for about the next month or two, I'm going to try to put together, piece by piece, a philosophical lexicon. Composing such a reference source in a single sitting would be too tedious for me, and you can be sure that my ADD would be fighting it every minute of the way. 

Instead, I'm going to post a separate entry for a new word each day, and combine them into a full-length lexicon, which by the end of this process should provide all of the definitions and examples needed to be able to participate fully in philosophical debates about perfume. 

Let us start at the very beginning, a very good place to start:


Entry #1: Philosophy

The word philosophy comes from the Greek (and Comrade Christos from Memory of Scent can back me up on this) for "love" and "wisdom". Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Love is probably not going to cause anyone to pause. But "wisdom"? What could this mean? 

My own take on this concept is that some people seek out the truth and a deep understanding of subject matters and their own place in the universe. Is wisdom the same as knowledge? Not exactly. One could know everything there is to know about the chemical components of a perfume without appreciating its beauty or greatness. On the other hand, a person entirely ignorant of the chemical components of a perfume may intuitively grasp truths through their experience of it. 

I believe that many perfumistas are philosophers in this sense: they are seeking to deepen their understanding of perfume and also themselves through traveling around the olfactory universe and testing lots of different perfumes. It seems to me that philosophy (love of wisdom) and love of perfume go hand in hand in cases where people are interested in perfumes not solely for functional benefits (pleasure, seductive appeal, fame and fortune, etc.) but also as things in themselves. Perfumistas who actively acquaint themselves with new perfumes are engaging personally with them, because scents elicit memories from the wearer's past and help to connect disparate things together to make more sense of the world.