Crítica de Perfume de Violetas en Español

inminente...

Prolegomenon to any Future Phenomenology of Perfume Perception

Serge Lutens Wax Sample Haiku Project

For each entry, I am selecting a sample at random, without reading the name, and writing a haiku to reflect an image which comes immediately to mind. These short texts are not and are not intended to be reviews. They also are not intended to grasp the entirety of the perfume but only a momentary and immediate reaction upon application of the wax to the skin on the back of my hand. I find that these perfumes are not linear, so any momentary image cannot capture the complexity but only offer a glimpse of one time slice of a wear. In some cases the perfume eventually becomes much more appealing than my opening image construction suggests.


Haiku #1: Chypre Rouge
Haiku #2: Un Bois Sépia
Haiku #3: Un Lys
Haiku #4: Mandarine-Mandarin
Haiku #5: Santal Blanc
Haiku #6: Encens et Lavande
Haiku #7: Rahat Loukoum
Haiku #8: Fumerie Turque
Haiku #9: Fleurs de Citronnier
Haiku #10: Santal de Mysore
Haiku #11: Bois de Violette
Haiku #12: Cuir Mauresque
Haiku #13: Tubéreuse Criminelle
Haiku #14: Douce Amère
Haiku #15: Boxeuses
Haiku #16: Iris Silver Mist
Haiku #17: Bornéo 1834
Haiku #18: Bois et Fruits
Haiku #19: Bois Oriental
Haiku #20: Rose de Nuit
Haiku #21: El Attariine
Haiku #22: Chêne
Haiku #23: Une Voix Noire
Haiku #24: La Myrrhe
Haiku #25: Rousse
Haiku #26: Louve
Haiku #27: Miel de Bois
Haiku #28: Vétiver Oriental
Haiku #29: Sarrasins
Haiku #30: Fourreau Noir
Haiku #31: De Profundis
Haiku #32: Muscs Koublai Khan

Lessons Learned

Cliff's Notes to Coco Chanel

Skeptical Reflections on History occasioned by my reading of

Famous Fashion Designers: Coco Chanel (2011), by Dennis Abrams

Having recently viewed three feature-length films about Coco Chanel, all of which emerged around 2009-—Coco before Chanel, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, and Coco Chanel-—I decided that it might be nice to read a book about her, given that the sum total of my knowledge of the topic was exhausted by the information relayed in those films.

Little did I know that there are hundreds of books about Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Most of them are thick tomes with lengthy bibliographies many of the entries of which are earlier biographies of Chanel, and all of the hefty biographies which I took a look at (but did not read) repeatedly cited texts from previous biographies. The history of Coco Chanel has become a veritable industry with scholars writing new biographies presumably to supersede previous biographies, when in fact the primary source of most of the information revealed in any of the books is also previous books.

That is the nature of historical research, of course, which for that very reason has never appealed to me. I am happy that other people are willing to mine through mountains of earlier historians' books to try to figure out what is true and what is false about what has already been said, but I am far too much of a skeptic to be able dedicate my life to that sort of task. Attempting to discern the false from the true in the interpretations of previous historians about important persons and events strikes me as otiose at best. What are the criteria applied? Are not historians often seduced by interpretations which have been artfully designed?

How can a person write a book today about someone who died more than forty years ago? Well, by studying all of the already existent books and attempting to find a “new” angle. Or by locating previously unknown sources of information, in newly discovered letters or documents, or in archives not already mined. To be honest, I have never really understood how people get grants for historical research in archives. I realize that some of them are looking to answer a specific question, but the notion that there is something in an archive to be found, precisely the information needed to answer one's research question, seems tendentious, at best. It also supposes that previous treatments of the topic were inadequate, and the only grounds I've been able to come up with for believing such a thing, in a general way, as the basis of a profession, seem quite pragmatic to me. Burgeoning historians wish to secure positions, and once in academia, they wish to remain gainfully employed.

Since coming up with a “new” angle is what historians are required to do in order to survive professionally, it naturally behooves them to diminish the value of earlier works on their subject so as to elevate their own. It's a strange sort of paradox really, because students of history must simultaneously pay the proper deference to their mentors (also historians), while coming up with something new to say, which seems to imply that at least some of their mentors were wrong. The most interesting question in all of this to me is: why would one believe a priori that there was a new or better angle to come up with? Are new readings supposed to be better simply because they are new?

In the case of new translations of literary works, the thinking seems to be that as language evolves and cultures change, translations need to be updated. That is why translations of works as old as Plato's Republic continue to appear with each new generation of scholars. There are the so-called canonical translations, but young scholars of both ancient Greek and philosophy sometimes put forth newer translations, presumably regarded by them as necessary, which would seem to imply that the currently available translations are in some way inadequate.

In the case of history, the situation seems far more puzzling to me. Anyone who wishes to write a biography of Plato has commenced from a biography-derived understanding of Plato. To modern people, Plato may as well be a fictional character, since all that we have are dead people's accounts of his life. So what could a new biography of Plato possibly say which has not already been said without simply inventing something new?

Needless to say, the above skepticism clearly demonstrates that I would never have made it through a graduate program in history, had I been foolish enough to matriculate in one. How to adjudicate such a delicate and untenable duality? How to both criticize as wrong while paying deference to earlier historians at the very same time? No, thank you all the same.

To return to the case of Coco Chanel, I confess to having been a bit overwhelmed by all of the scholarship on this topic, and it seemed to me that there are basically two kinds of books on offer. First, there are the loyalists, the true believers in Coco Chanel as a great woman, and then there are the anti-loyalists, concerned to reveal her arrant depravity and to expose her for the scoundrel she really was. It makes sense that biographers should be polarized in this way, because anyone who goes to the effort to write an entire book about a topic tends to care quite a lot about it. Yes, passion seems to drive the so-called dispassionate quest for truth in history as elsewhere.

Having myself no interest in becoming a Chanel scholar, I finally decided to opt for the most recently published book which was also as short as possible, since I figured that I'd be sure to learn at least enough from such a book to determine whether I find Coco Chanel a topic sufficiently interesting to warrant reading a lengthier book about her. The book I ended up checking out, Coco Chanel by Dennis Abrams, was published in 2011 and spans a grand total of 124 pages, including an index and chronology. “Perfect” I thought to myself as I requested the book from the library online.

When the book arrived, I was quite surprised to find that it looked an awful lot like a school textbook. The print was large and there were many sidebars and other clues that this little volume was intended for educational purposes. For one thing, the blurb for the author, Dennis Abrams, indicates that he has also written biographies of Hillary Rodham Clinton, H.G. Wells, Rachael Ray, Xerxes, Albert Pujols, Georgia O'Keefe, and Nicolas Sarkozy!

Apparently Mr. Abrams, “a voracious reader since the age of three,” chews through scholarly biographies of famous people and then spits out short readable synopses of their lives. So this book, from the Famous Fashion Designers series published by Chelsea House, is in effect a Cliff's notes version of all of the big fat biographies which I was not sufficiently motivated to read based only on what I had learned about Chanel in three recent films.

I initially hypothesized that this might be a book for vocational tech students who are learning how to sew or perhaps for introductory students at a college of fashion design, primarily because some of Abrams' jibes at Coco seemed a bit too pointed for younger students. He makes a rather big deal out of the fact that she often lied about her life, particularly her lowly origins, and at one point he insists that she was not a designer because she never designed anything in the sense of drawing or sketching a design on paper.

Eventually, after having read the book, I searched for Chelsea House online and discovered that this book is intended for grades 6-12! As a true testimony to my severe deficit in the Coco Chanel scholarship department, I must confess that I managed to learn quite a lot from this little book. Well, I think that I learned from it—-if what Abrams has written is true. What he suggests is that the films which I viewed were loosely based on history, with all sorts of modifications made to increase the coherence of the films as works in and of themselves.

Facts about Chanel's beginnings in the world of fashion, how she supported herself, and why she never married seem to have been distorted in the films in order to make her seem more independent and admirable than she may have been. According to Abrams, Chanel did not marry Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, but the reason seems to be that she was by then too old to bear him an heir. This is a very different version of the story than the one at least suggested in the films, which impart the distinct impression that Chanel was fiercely independent and refused to marry any man.

Another disparity involves the notion that Chanel was some sort of a feminist. Abrams explains that Chanel paid her workers poorly, and models especially, about whom she is cited as saying, “They're beautiful girls. Let them take lovers.” Again, when her workers went on strike to be paid better wages, as Abrams puts it, “Chanel felt that 'her girls' were getting paid quite enough as it was, and if they weren't, well, there were always men available who could help them.”

So much for the feminist myth. According to this account, Coco Chanel was definitely a liberated woman, but she was not a promoter of other women's liberation. The major contribution she appears to have made was to liberate women from their corsets, which was of course a good thing, but it's a far cry from feminism.

I learned a lot from this little book, as elementary as it is. The writing is not the best, but the text is readable. It certainly managed to pique my interest in this topic to the point where I now feel sufficiently motivated to take a stab at one of the larger tomes. I am especially interested in the story of the Wertheimer brothers who completely controlled the Chanel perfumery business. Coco Chanel apparently left everything to them when it came to perfume, initially because she wanted to focus on fashion. Later she regretted having signed off the rights to Chanel no 5, which was a resplendent success under the Wertheimers' management, but Chanel received only a small portion of the profits as a result of her contract with them. To find out more about that story, I'll need to read a bigger book. And I shall.

I do recommend this slim volume as a primer to people who are completely ignorant about the life of Coco Chanel. It would be a perfect lazy afternoon at the beach read as it offers enough of this woman's extraordinary life to keep even those who generally steer clear of biographies intrigued.  

Perfume Will Not Save You—Not Even Violet Perfume...

Ahora en español gracias a Gabriela Cortés!

reflections on 

Nadie te oye: Perfume de Violetas (2001), 

a film by Maryse Sistach*

The Story

Perfume de Violetas is set in modern-day Mexico City, where two adolescent girls, Yessica and Miriam, strike up an immediate friendship upon Yessica's arrival at her new school. She was expelled from her previous school for bad behavior and is generally strong willed, but her conflicts with authority seem to arise more often than not out of an abundance of energy conjoined with her refusal to docilely submit to bullies.

Yessica is a sensitive girl with a great joie de vivre and this is illustrated especially in the development of her friendship with Miriam. The first thing that Yessica notices upon sitting in the chair directly behind Miriam is that her long black hair smells wonderful. She looks at Miriam in awe from the moment of their first encounter, and from there on they become the best of friends.

Yessica lives in a poor part of Mexico City, so poor that the doors on her house, located below street level, are but hanging sheets, a clear indication that the family has nothing of value to protect from theft. Her mother toils her days away doing other people's laundry, and whenever Yessica is home, she is working too, either washing clothes or dishes, or caring for her mother's younger children. Her stepfather and stepbrother are stereotypical Latin macho males, and both seem to have little esteem for either Yessica or her mother.

As the friendship between Yessica and Miriam develops, the class distinction between the two girls becomes quite graphic. Miriam lives in a second-floor flat protected by barred windows and doors—what is typical for middle-class neighborhoods throughout Latin America. All of the bars may at first seem shocking to visitors from more prosperous countries where the general level of security obviates the need for such means. In upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Latin America, there are typically security guards stationed at street corners, and in especially affluent areas, each house may be individually guarded.

Miriam's standard of living would be considered closer to the working poor in the United States, as her mother works long days selling shoes at a Payless-type store, but from Yessica's perspective, Miriam lives in the lap of luxury. 

The first time that the girls go to Miriam's home, Yessica is filled with delight at the opulent sights of such “luxuries” as a refrigerator and a bathtub. The two girls indulge in a bath together, playing with bubbles and generally palling around. Aside from their mutual love of makeup and perfume, Miriam and Yessica are connected by the fact that neither has ever met her own father, having been raised by single mothers, although Yessica's is now remarried.

Throughout the development of their friendship, the scent of violets becomes a bind that ties the girls together. Miriam brings a bar of soap to school to let Yessica smell, indicating that it is the same scent which she noticed in her hair on the day they first met. 

At Miriam's house, Yessica is constantly spritzing herself with the liquids she finds in spray bottles. They look to be cheap drugstore-type perfumes or body sprays, but to Yessica they may as well be the nectar of the gods. The girls also play with makeup, and dance around when they are together after school, but the story takes a lurching turn for the worse one day when Yessica is walking back home alone after having spent time at Miriam's.

This harrowing scene, in which Yessica is brutally raped, was presaged by earlier conflicts. First, the girls had resisted the advances of Yessica's stepbrother and his friend, a bus driver, earlier in the week. In addition, Yessica and her stepbrother are in constant conflict back home, engaged in a relentless power struggle.

Shockingly, the bus driver grabs the girl as she is walking down the street and forcibly drags her to and throws her into his bus, which is parked in an empty lot. Meanwhile Yessica's stepbrother sits outside the bus, essentially guarding against any passersby who might approach and take note of what is transpiring inside.

The rape leaves Yessica badly bruised and battered. When she returns to school, the blood on her backside is noticed by some of the students during gym class. She is taken by the teacher to the school principal's office, where she is upbraided by both women, incapable as she evidently is of explaining what has happened to her. The principal looks eerily like Condoleezza “We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” Rice, and she conducts herself with great hostility, verbally abusing Yessica and thus adding insult to her horrific injuries.

Despite all that she has been through, Yessica pulls herself together and manages to continue on, refusing to let her spirit be daunted.

 But the rape has taken its toll on the girl, and when she goes with her boyfriend to La Fuente, a sort of lovers' lane where couples apparently often meet to make out, she abruptly pushes him away when he attempts to touch her. She jumps up and runs off, leaving the boy behind puzzled by her behavior. Of course, it all makes perfect sense, given what recently happened to her.

Miriam and Yessica continue to pal around and at one point they are looking at hair ties at a kiosk when Yessica steals a small bottle of violet perfume which she seems to find irresistible. The girl runs away with the bottle, leaving Miriam behind to contend with the wrath of the shop clerk. 

Miriam pays for the perfume and, in a state of shock that her best friend could have done such a thing, she goes to the store where her mother works to tell her what happened.

Miriam's mother has been worried about the friendship from the beginning, having noticed among other things that the two girls were smoking in the apartment, which incenses her, given the difficulty she had in kicking the habit.

After his friend the bus driver raped Yessica, her stepbrother, who appears to regard the incident as having been humorous, warns her not to tell anyone what happened “or else...” He was offered and accepted money by the rapist for having stood guard during the violation, and he uses the money to buy himself a pair of fancy new athletic shoes. 

Throughout the film, the fascination which these relatively poor people have with commodified objects of desire is illustrated over and over again. Symbolically, it is Miriam's mother who sells the shoes to the young man, entirely unaware of his connection to Yessica.

The friendship between Miriam and Yessica has suffered a severe rupture because of Yessica's theft of the violet perfume, and the humiliation and shame it caused to Miriam. It seems as though there is no way to repair the damage done, but Yessica creates a collage of pictures of her and Miriam and returns to her house, expressing sorrow and regret at what happened. 

The girls are relieved to be reunited once again, and Miriam flouts her mother's counsel to have nothing to do with Yessica. She also lets her into the house, against her mother's prohibition.

While visiting this time, Yessica steals a roll of money hidden in Miriam's mother's jewelry box, which she gives to her own mother, who has complained over and over again about the family's financial woes. The stolen money had been saved up slowly by Miriam's mother from her low-paying shoe store job to buy a new television, and when she discovers that it is missing she becomes irate. At one point she launches into a tirade about Yessica, insisting that she is not only a thief and a traitor but also a tramp. Basically, her explanation of what happened to Yessica (the rape) is that “she asked for it.”

Unbelievably, the bus driver and Yessica's stepbrother abduct her yet again for yet another rape in the bus (and it appears that this has become a serial event, although only two of the incidents are shown explicitly in the film). This time, Yessica is dazed and confused and manages to make her way back to Miriam's house but finds no one there. 

All of the doors and windows have been chained shut to prevent anyone's entrance. When it starts to rain, Yessica hides under the stairwell, where she falls asleep.

The next day, Yessica manages to drag herself to school, where Miriam's mother has been meeting with the principal to discuss the thefts committed by Yessica—both the violet perfume and the money—and Yessica is summoned to the office, but two of the school staff members recognize what has happened to her (her knees are badly bruised and her neck is bleeding). 

At last, someone at the school acknowledges to Yessica that “No one has the right to do that to you.” While the girl is in the school infirmary, Miriam shoots a paper airplane through the window with a note telling her to meet her in the bathroom.

Yessica goes to the bathroom expecting a reunion with her friend. Instead, Miriam assaults her verbally, repeating the words applied to Yessica by Miriam's mother: thief, traitor, tramp! The two girls, both angry, get in a shoving match, culminating tragically with Miriam's death when she falls backwards and bangs her head on the porcelain toilet.

 Yessica runs away from the scene and heads back to Miriam's house where she lays down on Miriam's bed.

When Miriam's mother returns home that night, she finds the door ajar and is visibly worried about her daughter until she sees that her bed is occupied. She lays down next to Yessica, who is completely covered with a blanket in the darkness. Thinking that the person in the bed is Miriam, the mother is deeply relieved to have found her back home, safe and sound. The film ends with the phone ringing, a call from someone at the school bearing the horrific news of her daughter's death.

Discussion

Perfume de Violetas is a depressing, almost nihilistic film. It is certainly an extreme example of film noir, albeit set in Mexico City, in that corruption suffuses the entire story. The only person among all of the various characters who appears to be entirely innocent is Miriam, who is killed as a result of all of the evil forces acting around her.

How might this tragedy have been averted? Perhaps only if Yessica had felt it possible to report the first rape as soon as it happened. She did not do so because she was living in a culture where the presumption was against females, who were to accept whatever was dished out to them. The behavior of females toward females throughout the film reveals that they, too, have been infected by insidious sexism.

My initial reaction to this film was that the ending was unduly and even gratuitously sinister, stretching credulity past its breaking point. The dénouement in fact reminded me a lot of what is probably my favorite film noir (also in blazing technicolor!): Plein Soleil [Purple Noon] (1960), directed by René Clément. The trauma which Miriam's mother will experience upon realizing that the girl in her daughter's bed is not Miriam, who is in fact dead, is truly painful to imagine.

The film is well made and well paced, covering an amazing amount of ground in only 90 minutes. It is clearly a low-budget production but is well directed, and the acting is also quite good. I was equally impressed by the artful selection and use of music. My primary gripe with the film was only that the plot was so horrible as to be too unrealistic. To my shock, I learned upon visiting IMDB.com (the Internet Movie Database) that Perfume de Violetas is based on a true story. So as unrealistically awful as the story was, it turns out that the events which it depicts really happened, which in some ways makes the whole thing even worse.

Perfume de Violetas is an important work. It highlights the living conditions of the poor and working poor in Mexico City and follows in a tradition of Spanish language film auteurs, including Luis Buñuel, who during his years in Mexico directed Los Olvidados [The Young and the Damned] (1950), a gritty black-and-white film also concerned with the plight of the poor of Mexico City, but people much worse off than either Miriam or Yessica (and with no access to or knowledge of perfume). Las Hurdes [Land without Bread] (1933), directed by Buñuel in Spain, also dealt with a much lower level of poverty than that depicted in Perfume de Violetas.

In this film, perfume plays an important role. Perfume is what first attracts Yessica to Miriam—or rather the scent of her hair, which has been washed with violet soap. Perfume serves throughout the story as a means for Yessica to escape from her own sordid conditions to a world of olfactory delight. 

Perfume represents promise and hope. It also serves as a salve to soothe the violated girl's pain. After having been raped, as Yessica attempts to get her wits about her, she refuses to be crushed but instead reaches for perfume, as though traveling to a fantasy world, where the evil people who mistreated her do not exist.

Perfume also serves as a temptation. Yessica steals the small bottle of violet perfume from the kiosk because she wants it so badly but has no money to buy it for herself. In this way, the perfume serves as a potential source of danger, for it causes Yessica to act in ways which disrupt the best thing she has ever had up until then: a friendship with a loving and kind girl who is so innocent that she does not yet make social and economic class divisions between different people.

Miriam accepts Yessica as she is, without questioning whether she is from “the wrong side of the tracks,” so to speak. Even when Yessica acts in ways which harm Miriam, she is able to forgive her. But in the end, she loses not only her friendship but her life, and that is why this film seems so nihilistic. The hope and beauty is all crushed, like Yessica's bottle of perfume by her angry mother, who throws it to the ground in a senseless display of outrage. In effect she says to her daughter through this gesture that she has no right to perfume, because they are poor.

What is the point of this film, for privileged perfumistas such as ourselves whose in some ways laughable monetary concern is whether we can afford the latest überniche luxury launch? How should we interpret this disturbing story?

To be honest, I sometimes wonder whether we are not living in a big fat scented bubble. When we complain about the price of perfume or bicker amongst ourselves over whether perfumery is an art, we are indulging in a luxury which is so far beyond the reality of most of the people on the planet, some of whose conditions are depicted in this film, that it verges on obscene.

Despite our elevated socioeconomic status—as evidenced by the fact that we are even capable of having perfume appreciation as a hobby—we are very much like Yessica in our fascination with perfume. We are willing to forgo other things in order to have our coveted perfume. But there is a positive message here as well.

In reality, it appears that we enjoy perfume in precisely the way in which Yessica does. Perfume is a source of pleasure for us, as it is for her. Does it matter whether we describe that source of pleasure in one way or another? Why can we not simply accept that perfume gives us pleasure? Why must there be more to it than that? Are we afraid of our own hedonism?

I also sometimes wonder whether the energy being currently directed to defend the claim that perfumery is one of the beaux arts is not disproportionate to what would be the consequences of that view, if it were affirmed by an elite few to be true. Clearly the experience of perfume by people such as Miriam and Yessica would not be altered in the least. 

Would our own appreciation of perfume change if we were to describe it in the lofty terms of some abstruse theory? I think not. We would still love perfume for precisely the same reason and in precisely the way in which Yessica does. Why? Because it smells good.

*Caveat: If you happen to number among the millions of persons currently attempting to wean themselves off SSRIs—having at last realized in what must have been a painful epiphany that it was all an elaborate ruse devised to pad the pockets of Pharmafirm CEOs while getting you to shut up—then I advise you to stay very far away from this grim, nearly nihilistic film.

Can We Talk? About Perfume? Part 2

What does disagreement 

about the value of a perfume really mean?

Perfume reception is the consummate expression of subjectivity. This is how and why two different perfume enthusiasts can disagree vehemently about the value of the very same perfume. Chandler Burr hails as masterpieces Diptyque Eau de Lierre and Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue. Turin & Sanchez deride both of those perfumes as one-star failures. If the value of a perfume were a matter of objective fact, then one of two critics who held diametrically opposed views would have to be wrong.

So is Light Blue a triumph of modern perfumery? Or is it a hopeless wreck, less a perfume than it is swill or dreck? Perhaps it all comes down to idiosyncratic tastes. Burr likes clean scents, which Turin & Sanchez appear generally to abhor. Burr appreciates streamlined scents, while Turin & Sanchez are easily bored. Burr likes amber and hails Prada Amber as a masterpiece. Turin & Sanchez dislike amber in general and, logically enough, Prada Amber more specifically. A chacun son goût. One person's masterpiece is another person's disaster. End of story.

Or perhaps the critics who disagree in their most basic evaluations really disagree because they actually smell different things, owing to the natural range of variations in scent sensitivity within a human population for all of the components of the complex mixtures known as perfumes. Perhaps those who despise some perfumes fail to detect their beauty because they do not smell everything that is there. Another possibility is that they smell more than most other people do. They may smell substances the presence of which would ruin another person's experience of the perfume, if only he were capable of detecting them. A chacun son nez.

If this way of understanding aesthetic disagreement about perfumes is true, then in seeking out the opinions of critics, we would do well to hew to those who seem to share our basic sensitivities. Otherwise, we'll be led astray by the advice of people different enough from us to make it the case that we actually smell different objects when we smell perfume even drawn from the very same bottle.

Given the considerable evidence of heterogeneity in human scent perception, the effort to point outward, attempting to taxonomize perfumes as stable things in the world alongside other stable things—whether various types of paintings or the products of less-exalted crafts such as cooking or winemaking—would seem ultimately to be an otiose endeavor. To do such a thing is to walk down a path to a dead-end, because the primary value of perfume—beyond its simple inducement in us of pleasure—is not artistic but philosophical. The aforementioned critics want to uphold the objective reality of perfumic masterpieces. But they cannot even agree amongst themselves about what the pillars of perfumery are supposed to be.

The best—and most charitable—way of understanding profound disagreements about perfume among self-proclaimed experts is simply to accept the intrinsically subjective nature of perfume perception: A chacun son goût et son nez! This vindicates the critics—they are neither incompetent nor anosmic—while however simultaneously implying that no one is really a better expert than anyone else when it comes to perfume, a conclusion which will likely make the self-styled experts bristle. If their opinions are no more worthy than anyone else's, then why should anyone listen to what they have to say? For what, precisely, are professional perfume critics being paid? 

I think that the answer is clear: they are promoting some perfumes which will be bought because many ignorant people will simply accept the self-appointed experts' advice as authoritative. They end by serving as marketing shills when they hail certain perfumes, holding them up as objective masterpieces, and effectively advise their readers to avoid those which they either omit from mention or vociferously decry. The “experts” become marketing tools—whether wittingly or not—because perfume, being essentially and inextricably enmeshed in an economic context, is consumable and commodified. People pay to wear perfumes, and they choose to buy some but not others on the basis of the so-called experts' advice. Or am I giving the critics too much credit? How many of the millions of perfume consumers out there even know their names?

Probably not that many, I'd surmise. But another bottle sold is still another bottle sold, so marketers will support those who support the products which they are trying to sell. This explains how and why mutually beneficial arrangements such as The Art of Scent Exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design can arise under the guise of objective art appreciation when in fact the works being exalted are already best-selling perfumes.

What do perfume marketers do?

Christian Dior does not use screen captures of Charlize Theron from the film Monster (2003) to advertise their best-selling perfume J'Adore. 

Instead, they seduce consumers into believing that they, too, will be bathed in a golden light of glamour, if only they buy and wear the perfume. 

J'Adore has been reformulated, but the advertisements remain more or less the same and are apparently just as effective as—if not more than—they were at the perfume's launch.

It probably does not matter much anymore what's inside the bottle. So long as it is at least wearable, women will continue to buy the perfume, seduced by the vain hope that they, too, can be as glamorous as Charlize Theron. But the properties of the perfume are completely distinct from the images used to market the perfume. This point is graphically illustrated when the same model advertises a variety of different perfumes.

Given the highly subjective basis for perfume appreciation, slapping new and foreign but apparently approbative labels on familiar perfumes, exalting them as masterworks of this or that movement in art, would seem to be just another variation on the marketer's game. 

In advertisements for perfumes, we are told, in effect, that we will be beautiful and glamorous or sexy and alluring, if only we don the product which the advertisement is attempting to persuade us to buy. There is no logical connection between the models who pose in perfume advertisements holding bottles and the liquid inside. All of this is no more and no less than a game of sleight of hand.

Similarly, the application to perfumes of labels borrowed from the visual arts such as Neo-romanticism and Surrealism is essentially equivalent to what marketers have always done. In other words, one way of understanding the current exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design is as an innovative and ingenious marketing scheme. Perfumistas may wish to believe otherwise, but perfumery is a business, and anyone who has even the faintest grasp of the nature of the enterprise of enterprise should be well aware that the managers who agreed to invest money in the Art of Scent exhibit were concerned above all with one thing: selling more of their perfume.

Perfumistas see this:

and hail the dawning of a new age, in which perfume is finally given the recognition it deserves as one of the beaux arts.

In contrast, the people at the corporate headquarters of the perfume conglomerate giants making financial investment decisions—whether or not to fund The Art of Scent exhibit and donate free perfume to the Museum of Arts and Design—see, instead, this:

As they deliberate over whether to fund such an initiative, they may rub the palms of their hands together while dreaming gleefully about upcoming second-quarter returns. 

I do not mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with any of this. Savvy businessmen have always succeeded through such schemes. Indeed, the very point of marketing—its raison d'être—is to persuade people to believe that they need what they do not need, and to buy what they would not otherwise have bought. We have a wide range of choices in deciding how to dispense with our wallet share available for nonessential expenses, including luxuries such as perfume. Marketers' job is to see to it they we spend our money on their products, not those of the competition.

The marketing masterminds who agreed to promote the event are well aware that the fact that the perfumes on display in “The Art of Scent” are not being sold in the museum's gift shop certainly will not prevent enthusiastic exhibit goers from stopping at the nearest Sephora or other retail perfume purveyor on their way home. As for the countless people who have no way to travel to New York City to see the exhibit, they can console themselves by purchasing bottles of the “masterpieces” online.

The reason why all of this should matter, to supporters of independent perfume houses, is because consumers only allocate a portion of their budget to perfume, and once that money has been spent, it will not be spent again. Judging by some of the gushing I've seen around the blogs, some perfumistas have come to believe that exalting bestselling perfumes as artistic masterpieces will somehow help independent perfumers, when in fact nothing could be farther from the truth.

In reality, the more money people spend at the big houses funding the exhibit and whose works are being heralded as masterpieces, the less they will spend on the unnamed houses not being celebrated. The irony in all of this is that the perfumistas who rush to lavish praise upon Chandler Burr and his initiative seem to be entirely unaware of the likely economic outcome of this scheme: to buoy and promote the ongoing corporatization of perfumery. If Chandler Burr's funding, including his own salary, derives from the megacorporations controlling the houses whose works are currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design, then he works for them. If his initiative succeeds in improving those companies' bottom line, then he will keep his job. If not, he will not.

The Good News

Can we talk about perfume? Yes, of course. Why? Because we do. Hundreds of new perfume reviews are written online every day, and people are reading them. The reviews combine personal anecdote and feelings with references to terms recognizable to other perfume lovers because they derive from what has emerged as a full-fledged perfume culture. The discourse among members of fragrance communities is informed by an idiom used by perfumers themselves. This makes perfect sense because perfumers know more than anyone else what their own intentions are in developing a new creation with particular aesthetic properties.

Certain conventions have already been widely embraced. Because perfumistas often commence from the text created by perfumers and marketers themselves, they have become fond of talking about the objects of their devotion in triangular hierarchies, as though there really were a distinct and distinguishable top, middle, and base to perfumes. 

In reality, the various stages in the evolution of a nonlinear perfume—from spritz to disappearance—are infinitely more nuanced and unfold continuously with no sharp breaks from one stage to the next. In some ways, perfume development bears similarities to music, which, too, flows through time in ways that static paintings, sculptures, and buildings do not.

The complex evolution of a perfume over time can also be compared to the aging process of a person. Each person is born an infant, grows and transforms continuously over the decades comprising his or her life, until old age and finally death, at which point there is little—if any—resemblance to the person's appearance at birth. At any moment in time we can describe how the person looks: her size, weight, and shape; the color of her hair and eyes; the texture of her skin; the presence or absence of skin pigmentation, etc. Just as in the case of perfume, we can decide to divide the life into three parts: childhood, adulthood, and old age, but those are in some ways arbitrary divisions, although they can be useful in certain circumstances.

Despite its somewhat fictional quality and the grayness of its boundaries, the tripartite hierarchy in perfume profiles may be nonetheless helpful because in fact the opening stages in a perfume's development are detectable but also transient, ceding quickly to the later stages, the longest and most memorable part of which we refer to as the drydown.

In discussing what they perceive during their experience of a perfume, reviewers sometimes lament not “getting” this or that note, but in reality the notes are nearly never ingredients, as some of them are explicitly claimed to be by the perfumers themselves in self-consciously minimalist perfumes such as Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 and Molecule 02 and Juliette Has A Gun Not A Perfume.

Iso-E-super is usually not mentioned as a note even though it is quite frequently used as a cedar surrogate, just as ambroxan is used to mimic natural ambergris, which is often listed as a note though it is in such cases a fiction. All of this should suffice once and for all to demonstrate that the ingredients are not the notes, and the alleged notes said to be salient in a given creation by marketers are metaphors and manifest evocations: an attempt to tell consumers what they are supposed to find in the perfume.

Those who know the difference between the scent of cedar and the scent of the aromachemicals used to confer a cedar-like quality to a perfume, may say that they do not detect cedar in a perfume which lists cedar as a note. And they are right. Others may have arrived at a concept of cedar which is more open and includes the scent of the aromachemicals used to mimic the scent of cedar in nature, just as the perfumer intended them to. 

Once we know what iso-E-super and ambroxan smell like, having compared them directly to perfumes containing real cedar and ambergris extracts, then we may become difficult to fool, jaded and even annoyed by the near ubiquity of the use of such blatant aromachemical surrogates under the guise of more natural substances. But iso-E-super and ambroxan are only the beginning of the story, or the first drops in a sea of metaphor. 

No perfume literally contains a cedar tree. Even those which contain substances derived directly from cedar wood are abstractions. Why are certain substances included in perfumes while others are not? Why do perfumers choose to produce a cedar scent, or one which smells like ambergris? For their effects on our sensory apparatus.

Ionones are used to produce a violet-like scent; and eugenol smacks of clove to many. But because different people have variable sensibilities and sensitivities to all scents, the first-person experience of a perfume may bear little—if any—resemblance to what the press materials decree is the nature of the creation which they have launched and are attempting to sell. Sometimes this is because they use unfamiliar metaphors: oud and papyrus may have scents, but how many times have most of us encountered them beyond the realm of perfume?

When we identify notes, we are sharing with others our own subjective experience of a perfume. Likewise, when we laud a perfume as beautiful or great, we may be saying something about its aesthetic properties, but we are also saying something—indeed, much more—about ourselves. The reason why we perfumistas have been flocking together to discuss perfume is that we have established a language through which to share our experiences with others who also appreciate these same sorts of insights made possible by perfume.

By penning reviews and commenting on them, explaining how our own experience coheres or does not with that of another perceiver of the same perfume, we broaden our understanding of not only perfume, but also ourselves. We come to see what it means to perceive different facets of a perfume and how two equally valid experiences may arrive at divergent judgments about the value of the very same thing, as a result of each individual's distinct history, memories, personality, and tastes.

Perfume language should be exactly what develops among perfume lovers informed by perfumers and marketers because the only reason why we have any understanding of perfume at all is because it is sustained through the perception by some people of perfume as profitable. If no one believed that they could make money from selling perfume, then they would sell something else, and we would not be meeting to discuss perfumes—the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly—because they would not exist at all.

At the end of the day, what matters is our personal experience of perfume. This implies, among other things, that if one loves celebrity fragrances despised by niche snobs, one should nonetheless wear them with one's head held high. How could anyone be a better judge of what one likes than one's self? 

It does not matter whether other people disagree with our taste in perfume, although it would be decent of us, whenever possible, to make an effort not to offend others or induce in them undue strife, as a courtesy to our fellow community members, by which we express our respect for and tolerance of difference. Within the privacy of our home, anything goes: we are the kings and queens of our scented castle!

What are perfume reviews?

Perfume is a cultural artifact, but it has no meaning unless it is experienced, and for many people, the perfume story ends at pleasure. It is no coincidence that perfumes lauded as “great” are also thought by many to be delightful to smell. But perfume perception can also serve as a phenomenological tool, providing insight into our place in the universe and how we in fact construct it, conceptually speaking. Because of the intimate connections in our nervous system between the processes of olfaction, cognition and emotion, perfume immediately elicits memories of our past and may trigger in our mind a cascade of emotions, images, and ideas. 

There is no question that marketers attempt to shape those images through advertising, but any positive label or image attached or implied points the consumer in the very same direction: to reach for his or her credit card. 

Looking beyond the perceiver, to the established art world in trying to make sense of perfume, is to turn away from the profound philosophical insights to which perfume may give rise. It is also to diminish or deny the value of the uniquely intimate engagement which forms the very basis of our love of perfume. We do not love a perfume because someone else has labeled it in one way or another or hailed it as a masterpiece. No, we love a perfume, when we do, for the pleasure it provides and the richness it adds to our mental life, thanks to its ability instantly to evoke ideas and images in our mind. 

The language in which we discuss perfume must connect directly with the objects of our own experience as recorded in our memory bank because that is both how and why perfume succeeds in affecting us. We compare perfumes to other, noncomposed scents, because we have memories of them, too. As perfumistas grow more and more familiar with the vast terrain of the universe of perfume, they may begin to compare perfumes to one another. However we choose to convey our experience, it must commence from ideas in our own minds, whether rudimentary or complex, and whatever their provenance. We are, in the end, products of our culture.

Some perfume reviewers take themselves to be offering advice to their readers about which perfumes are good and which are not. Others, however, regard their task as a more modest one: to record the subjective experience of their own encounter with a perfume. Such an experience can never, strictly speaking, be replicated, even within the very same perceiver who spritzes on the very same perfume. Why? Because the perceiver will have changed, and the conditions in which the perfume is being used will be different, too.

In fact, the two different kinds of reviewers may inhere in the very same person, someone who chronicles his or her subjective experience in order to inform other people that there is someone somewhere who has experienced the perfume thus. In other words, the review expresses one possible reaction to the perfume, which may or may not cohere with other people's experience. It is interesting, all the same, because it reveals how other people may perceive what we perceive in an entirely different way. Therein lies the profound philosophical importance of perfume.

part 1