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?

Entry #11: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Utility, Utilitarian, Utilitarianism

These words all relate in the vernacular to use. In everyday conversation, utility just means usefulness. Somewhat confusingly, these simple terms were appropriated by two nineteenth-century philosophers, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, for a specific normative ethical theory, which they called Utilitarianism.

According to utilitarianism, the right action is the one which maximizes the utility of the greatest number of people, where utility is understood to mean either happiness or pleasure, and those terms are generally not taken to coincide. Some utilitarians advocate pure hedonism, with pleasure being the ultimate measure of any- and everything. J.S. Mill felt that there were "higher" and "lower" pleasures, and that higher pleasures (intellectual endeavors) were more valuable than what might be termed the "animal" pleasures. However one decides to understand utility, the idea is simple enough and is expressed by the principle of utility:

Always act so as to maximize the net outcome for all relevant persons taken together as a group.  

I've been thinking about utilitarianism today as I sit at home in "lock-down" with my fellow Bostonians while law enforcement officers conduct a manhunt for the missing suspect in the case of the bombing perpetrated during the marathon on Monday. The people interviewed today (friends, family, and former teachers of the suspects) make it sound as though these two brothers would never do anything so heinous, but someone obviously did, so we'll have to see how the evidence stacks up. I've no doubt that the suspects sought in this case can be demonstrated to be guilty, if indeed they are guilty. Now that one of them is dead, I certainly hope that they were the culprits, and not someone else. 

Here is a famous thought experiment discussed whenever the philosophical theory of utilitarianism is introduced. It illustrates the distinctive properties of this particular approach to morality and goes basically like this:

Imagine that a vicious killer is at large, and the people of a city have been crying out in outrage for days. The mayor wishes to quell the riots erupting all over the place, and with them the deaths which may be caused by the angry crowd. He therefore selects some poor schmuck to serve as a patsy. Evidence is marshaled, and the suspect is put on display. The public expels a collective sigh of relief. 

Those calling for the murderer's head have now been appeased, and the riotous crowds have dispersed. The city returns to its normal business, though the real killer has not been apprehended, but the mayor has acted in this way so as to maximize the happiness of the greatest number of people. 

During the period when they believed that the killer roamed at large, the citizens were unable to sleep at night or get anything done, filled with anxiety as they were that they might be the next in line to become his victim. Once someone was fingered for the crimes, everyone settled down, and the only person who suffered as a result of the mayor's decision was the innocent person framed.

The test for your own assessment of utilitarianism is how you react to this sort of scenario. Another similar example involves torturing one person to save many more. These sorts of awful dilemmas have unfortunately arisen in history, particularly under repressive regimes when, out of fear for their own lives, people have agreed to do what they would not otherwise have done. 

The thought experiments are not personalized and so are intended to allow people to reflect upon whether they find utilitarianism to be intuitively sound. Obviously, human rights are not intrinsic to this moral outlook. Human rights are valuable to a utilitarian only insofar as they may maximize the happiness of the greatest number. 

Perfume Applications

How does this approach to morality apply specifically to the case of perfume? I think that there are several ethical dilemmas which may raise the question of the validity of utilitarianism.

• Some people maintain that animal testing of cosmetics (including perfume) is justified, because it maximizes the happiness of the greatest number at the expense of a few (the animals experimented on).

• The people who produce fake perfumes and fob them off to unsuspecting consumers may believe that they are doing the right thing because most people cannot tell the difference anyway, and they are able to purchase the fakes at a significant discount. (I'm not saying that they actually reason this way, but it is a possible rationalization for what they do, and it may well allow some of them to sleep better at night...)

• Similarly, perfume companies may lie about whether they have reformulated their perfumes (or the extent to which they have) under the assumption that most people will never know anyway, so the net outcome is better, all things considered.

• In our wearing of perfume, we may think about the people likely to be around us when we select our scent of the day. Going to the library, for example, I am unlikely to choose a perfume with huge sillage because I do not want to offend other people, and I especially do not want to bother people with allergies. Sure I might prefer to wear something louder that day, but I will be in a public place, so I reason that the net consequences will be better if I sacrifice my own pleasure in order to accommodate those who may not agree with my perfume choice.

What about you, my fragrant friends, can you think of other utilitarian examples applicable to the case of perfume?

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 #10: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Emotivism

Empirical testing cannot adjudicate disputes when it comes to values. Let's take a case involving morality. You cannot argue a sociopath into believing that what he does is wrong, and you cannot show him anything in the world which proves that he should not do what he does. He feels no compunction whatsoever and will be deterred from acting however he wishes only by the law, specifically, the threat of punishment. He will carefully conceal his activities so as not to get caught, but the reason why he wants not to get caught is emphatically not because he cares what other people think. No, he simply wishes to retain his liberty to continue to do whatever he wants to do while "passing" as a normal person, as though he were moved by moral sentiment, within civil society.

One solution to the problem of disputes in matters of value more generally—both moral and aesthetic—is simply to deny that claims about value are anything more than the expression of the speaker's emotions. This is the gist of the theory of value known as emotivism, which offers a straightforward and simple way of understanding what people are doing when they argue about values or morality or aesthetics—or anything insusceptible of empirical testing.

Yes, we can observe a painting, and we can smell the scent of a perfume. But can we perceive that either of these are great works of art? No, the emotivist will insist. That sort of talk is a bunch of balderdash. Disputes in morality and in aesthetics are really much more about the disputants' reception of the objects than about the objects ostensibly under discussion. The speaker's attitude can be positive or negative. In this view, ranting about a perfume is akin to throwing a temper tantrum, no more and no less than a way of venting emotions. 

This perspective can make some sense of the otherwise difficult to comprehend tirades by people who seem to harbor a visceral hatred of the house of Creed. I've seen similar behavior toward Bond no 9 as well, and the question becomes: why should anyone care so much about these houses? No one is forcing them to buy, and if anyone finds the price incommensurate with the value of the perfume, then they are perfectly free to walk right on by. 

Instead, people often become highly emotional in denouncing especially Creed, blinded to the likelihood, given the large number of fakes circulating about, that the "swill" which they have sniffed wasn't Creed at all. The emotivist will reply that such strong emotional reactions betray the speaker's own peculiar issues. Maybe they'd be happier with a higher salary? Or less debt?

My distinct impression is that many perfumistas accept something like emotivism when it comes to perfume appreciation in venues such as the fragrance community websites. The tried and true adage one perfumista's treasure is another perfumista's trash leaps to mind once again. The entire enterprise of swapping relies on the fact that people disagree about the value of perfumes. Are some of them right and others wrong? The emotivist will say "No." There is no "truth" of the matter, in the way in which there is truth in matters of science.

Either the earth is flat, or it is not. It's not a matter of anyone's personal feelings about the question. Either a perfume has or has not been reformulated. If so, then it contains different ingredients or different proportions than it did at the time of its launch. That sort of question about a perfume can be answered through a procedure. Take a sample of the earlier perfume and a sample from a bottle produced later and have them analyzed using gas chromatography. You will find that either the graphs match, or they do not. If they do not match, then the perfume's composition has changed, regardless of the fact that it has kept the same name.

Yes, there are matters of fact when it comes to perfume: all of the facts which are amenable to scientific testing, according to the emotivist. What the emotivist denies is that someone's proclamation that a perfume is "one of the top ten of all time" means anything more than that the speaker loves the perfume.

We have seen this again and again in the perfume world, all over the place. In perfume reviews people may wax poetic about the ostensible object of their review, but in the end they tell us much more about themselves than they do about the perfume.

Emotivism may of course be false. It is a theory, after all—and a nonempirical one at that! Maybe there are value-laden facts about perfume. But if so, why do people not agree about what those facts are? Some people love Thierry Mugler Angel and Christian Dior Poison. Others find them abhorrent. What principles can be applied to adjudicate such disputes? To counter the emotivist's skeptical denial that value judgments are a matter of objective fact, one must come up with some way of resolving the disputes about value which arise among equally informed, equally intelligent people equipped with equally sensitive noses. 

People who wish to claim that their personal judgments about perfumes are authoritative, somehow more reliable or accurate than those of others, need to produce some basis for this claim. What is it about them that makes them uniquely qualified to judge the quality of perfumes? Or are such people merely projecting their tastes in perfume upon the world? That is the question, my fragrant friends.

Entry #9: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Ethics

What is right, and what is wrong? Which actions are permissible and which are impermissible? These are questions of ethics. In philosophy there are two fundamentally different approaches to ethics, deontological and teleological.

• A deontological or duty-based theory of ethics prioritizes rightness to goodness. Why should you do the right thing? Not because you'll go to heaven and avoid hell. Not because the world will be a better place if you do. No, the reason to do the right thing is just because it is the right thing to do.

• A teleological or ends-based theory of ethics defines rightness in terms of goodness. The reason why you should do the right thing is because by doing so you will generate something good, a better state of affairs, the result of your action.

The easiest way to illustrate the distinction between deontological and teleological theories of ethics may be by considering the case of lying. If it is wrong to lie, then presumably you should not lie. But maybe it isn't really wrong to lie. Can anyone speak "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"? Does ought imply can? Even if it is impossible to tell "the whole truth", perhaps it is still wrong intentionally to lie because when you do so you people the world with liars, who undermine the conventions of trust upon which civilization rests.

What if telling a lie will save someone's life? A strict deontologist might still insist that it would be wrong to lie. A teleologist, in contrast, would be more apt to deny that lying is wrong in that case. 

In perfumery, do questions of ethics arise? Yes, of course. Why? Because perfumery is a human enterprise. Businesses themselves may be amoral (although strangely corporations in the modern world have been granted legal rights akin to those enjoyed by persons), but all businesses are run by people. If an action is wrong, then doing it for money does not make it right. Does it?

Here are a few of the many ethical questions which apply in perfumery:

• Is animal testing wrong? PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has produced a list of companies which test on animals, and a list of cruelty-free companies, which do not test on animals, as a matter of principle.

• Is it wrong to wear perfumes which cause other people distress?

• Is it wrong for companies to lie about reformulation--whether (and if so why) it has been undertaken?

• Is it wrong for companies to seduce people through marketing to believe that they need what they do not need? Or is that just fair business practice? Is seduction the essence of marketing?

• Is it wrong for companies to produce knock-offs of famous perfumes? There are bona fide knock-off companies, which print on the box that they are offering a less-expensive fragrance which is evocative of a famous perfume. This is clearly legal.

• What about the perfumic equivalent of plagiarism? I doubt that this happens as often as some have alleged, but on occasion there may be a chemist who studies the chromatogram of a successful perfume and attempts to re-create something along the same lines. Is there anything wrong with that? 

Some of these issues involve a type of duplicity, which raises all of the questions about lying—whether it is wrong (and if so why), whether it can under some circumstances be right. Others of these issues involve questions about how to treat our fellow sentient creatures. But they are all about ethics. 

Entry #8: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Relativism

We have well-established conventions governing scientific and logical truth. Is there an absolute or objective truth when it comes to judgments of value? Folk expressions of relativism abound:

To each his own.

A chacun son goût.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Whatever floats your boat.

and the swapping perfumista's pride and joy:

One perfumista's trash is another perfumista's treasure

Most of the above adages are generally thought to apply to aesthetics and matters of taste, not necessarily morality. When in Rome, do as the Romans do might seem to have moral implications, but it seems to be used more often in contexts regarding social conventions. 

Think about driving conventions. In some parts of the world, drivers move forward on the left side of the road. In other parts of the world, drivers move forward on the right side of the road. There is no absolute right or wrong about the matter—it's just a convention, no more and no less.

In contrast, people who believe in morality typically deny that the fact that one society kills certain types of people implies that it is "right for them". Entire cultures and societies can just be wrong, for example, in allowing slavery or child prostitution. There are some moral relativists around, who maintain that morality, too, is ultimately a matter of social conventions, but usually people's passionate reactions to what they take to be atrocities betray that they regard morality in more absolute terms than, say, taste in perfume.

Should we say, then, that there is no absolute truth about perfume when it comes to aesthetic judgment? I have pondered over this question at length here at the salon de parfum in response to what I found to be the somewhat remarkable disagreement among self-styled perfume experts on these matters. It would be one thing if "the experts" disagreed about why a given perfume was great. But how can they disagree about whether a given perfume is a masterpiece or a disaster?

On the one hand, it seems obvious that people judge perfumes by appeal to their own idiosyncratic tastes. On the other hand, many people wish simultaneously to maintain that perfume is an art and that there are genuine masterpieces to be heralded as great. Because of the nature of the perfumery business, the exaltation of some perfumes but not others as great is bound to have market effects. There seems even to be a circular approbation in some cases: that a perfume is a market success leads people to herald it as great, and once it has been heralded as great, its market success is perpetuated...

When we claim that a perfume is great or a masterpiece or a work of art, are we saying anything more than that we love it? That is the question, my fragrant friends...

Entry #7: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Truth

In some ways, the concept of truth seems too obvious to bother discussing. In other ways, it seems too elusive to pin down, which can lead to the same conclusion: why bother?

Philosophers have spent a lot of time trying to understand what it means for a statement to be true. In logic, it's pretty straightforward. There are truth conditions on each type of logical statement. Let us consider one example, the conditional or hypothetical statement:

(1) If this perfume is a genuine Chanel perfume, 

then it was produced by the house of Chanel.

(2) If this perfume was produced by the house of Chanel, 

then it is a genuine Chanel perfume.

Which of these statements are true? These are conditional statements, readily recognizable by the if-then structure. If the first part (the antecedent or "if clause") of a conditional statement is true, then the second part (the consequent or "then clause") must be true in order for the statement as a whole to be true.

If the antecedent of a conditional statement is false, then the consequent could be either true or false, and the statement as a whole would still be true. In other words, the falsehood of the antecedent automatically guarantees the truth of the conditional statement. 

The two statements together express both a necessary and a sufficient condition: we can know that any genuine Chanel perfume was produced by the house of Chanel (not a knock-off operation), and any perfume produced by the house of Chanel is a genuine Chanel perfume. Because both of these statements are true, their conjunction is as well:

(1) & (2)

The truth conditions on a conjunction (joined by and or the ampersand) are simple. Both of the conjuncts must be true in order for the statement as a whole to be true. 

If all of this seems quite boring and trivial to you, that is probably because working out truth conditions on such logical statements is a far cry from talking about truths in reality. 

According to one theory of truth, the correspondence theory,  a true statement is one which corresponds to a state of affairs. We have an intuitive grasp of what truth is, but our criterion for denying that something is true is that it contradicts something else which we know or believe to be true.

Reformulation may on its face seem to be a good example. A perfume house may deny that they reformulated a perfume, and they may be telling the truth, or they may be lying, under the assumption that they have a right to say whatever they like about their own perfumes. 

If we examine the label of our bottle of Yves Saint Laurent Champagne, which was renamed as Yvresse, and compare the ingredients listed to recent bottles of Yvresse, we may conclude that the perfume is no longer the same. (This is only an example, and I hasten to add that I am not sure that Yves Saint Laurent has ever denied having reformulated its perfumes...)

It is possible, however, that labeling conventions have changed. You may have noticed that in the past many perfume bottles listed basically three ingredients:

Alcohol, fragrance (parfum), water. 

Not so anymore! These days, the list of ingredients goes on and on and on. So just finding that the labels read differently does not necessarily mean that the perfume was prepared using a different formula.

Sometimes houses simply contradict themselves. A recent example would seem to be Guerlain's announcement that they would be bringing Mitsouko back to its former glory. If they earlier claimed that the perfume was reformulated in order to comply with IFRA restrictions, then something has to give. Either it was never necessary to reformulate the perfume in the first place, or else it is impossible to bring Mitsouko back to its former glory, given the reigning IFRA restrictions, which have become more not less strict over the last few years.

The law of non-contradiction is key here. We reject the truth of a claim by showing that it is self-contradictory or implies something which we know to be false. The law of non-contradiction is the skeptic's most faithful ally, and the only inviolable principle. The skeptic may question every other statement ever made by anyone, but the basis of his rejection of some statements and theories is that something cannot both be and not be in the same way and at the same time.

Is reformulation a kind of self-contradiction? The answer to this question appears to be: No. Although we may bemoan reformulation (a few brave souls, going against the current trend, have argued that reformulations are often improvements!), it is not necessarily a contradiction for a company such as Coty to fob off a vastly inferior version of Muguet des Bois under the very same name as the perfume formerly known as Muguet des Bois.

It may be that, in the case of perfumery, the truth conditions are slightly different than we have come to believe in the case of most objects and things. The prevailing convention regarding naming of perfumes (given rampant reformulation) is that the company which produces a perfume gets to decide what goes in it, and they can change the ingredients at their caprice—for any reason whatsoever. 

The reason why people feel that they have been cheated when they buy a bottle of reformulated perfume going by the same name (and usually sold in the same type of bottle) as a cherished perfume is because they are assuming something akin to Leibniz' law:

Two things are identical if and only if all of their properties are the same.

In perfumery, the criteria are more lax: "Shalimar is Shalimar" just means that Shalimar is still created by Guerlain. That's it. They can pour whatever they like in the bottle and call it Shalimar, and their having done so is the necessary and sufficient condition for its being Shalimar, even though it may smell nothing like the original launch of that perfume.

When we feel cheated in a case of reformulation, it is because we have not fully appreciated that the house has the final say on its own creations. It's a godlike power, in a way. The house giveth and the house taketh away, and there is absolutely nothing that we consumers can do about it—beyond voting with our wallets. That is the extent of our power  in this realm.