The Ubiquity of Scent

Difficult to believe though it may be, I now find myself in the position of not being able to wear any perfume--for two entire weeks! I am caring for my mother's beloved shih-tzu while she is away on a cruise with her husband (my step-dad). This seemed like a good thing for me to do. The pup has Cushing's disease and is twelve years old, and my mom was seriously concerned that she might come home to a dead dog if she put her up in a kennel or in a ward at the local veterinary hospital. So here I am.

Deciding which perfumes to wear was a difficult task, as many other perfumistas have reported about similar scenarios in the past. It was a bit less difficult, I suppose, because the bulk of my excessive bottle collection is now hidden snuggly away in a storage space. I have been perfuming myself with a fraction of my collection selected primarily for hot-weather readiness--and of course general wonderfulness. It's actually a good exercise to find out which of one's bottles are really worth holding onto and which could be given away without undue strife. As I made my way through my storage space deciding on my summertime perfume wardrobe, I found myself drawn compulsively to Hermès. Basically every Hermès I saw I wanted to add to the pile to take back to my house. Ditto for the Prada, though that was in part because I own full-on jugs of both Infusion d'Iris and Infusion d'Homme, which are perfect for summertime with their clean yet sophisticated personalities. Same for the other Prada Infusions, all of which I own. (Yeah, I know.)

Over the course of the summer I have nearly drained my bottle of Creed Fleurs de Bulgarie, but I have a back up in storage, so no worries! I have also made inroads into my third bottle of La Perla La Perla (the old bottle with the ugly black plastic cap, not the new one, the contents of which I do not like). Rather than Hermès, the houses I've reached for most often over the past couple of months have been Miller Harris and Ineke. Poet's Jasmine appears now to be my favorite "wear to the library" perfume, despite its formidable sillage. I also continue to spritz my way through Le Labo Poudre d'Orient (now on bottle #2). Guerlain Chamade (also bottle #2) and Houbigant Quelques Fleurs L'originale (a twentieth-century vintage) have been worn quite a lot as well.

You might be wondering: Are those really hot-weather scents? They are chez moi, at least this summer, and especially after a bath and before bedtime, because I now own an air conditioner and use it to create a cool-weather climate to escape to when the space downstairs starts to feel like a steam bath. Thanks to my air conditioner, I have even managed to drink a lot of hot tea this summer!

So the trip. What to bring? I debated a few options, including to tote along only two or three bottles which might be drainable during the trip, after which I could toss the empty vessels. Of course, not all bottles are toss-worthy, but that seemed like a good idea since I am trying to tame my tendency toward "collecting"--what is now officially known as "hoarding". Apparently the latest (twenty-first-century) conventional wisdom is that we are now supposed to read all of our books and magazines on Kindle and watch movies streamed live. Anyone who persists in maintaining big collections of either books or DVDs must be pathological!!!!! Ditto for perfume, well, except that it is a pathology afflicting only about .00001% of the population. You know you have a problem when you expel a sigh of relief upon sighting a collection at Parfumo or Fragrantica even larger than your own--especially if it's double or triple the size! (Thank you, Action.)

That logic does not really work, of course. The fact that a person owns 1,000 perfumes does not make it any less excessive for me to own 400. I think that I may have more than that, but the stuff that I really need to get rid of--because I never, ever wear it--I no longer list anywhere.

I could not settle on two or three bottles, nor did it seem like the best solution to my predicament, given that I have hundreds if not thousands of sample vials and decants, and I know for a fact that evaporation is a much worse problem for those than for bottles. In the end, I gathered up a bunch of Histoires des Parfums and Tauer Perfumes samples, and packed them in my bag. Happily I flew on Jet Blue which still permits passengers to bring a bag large enough for a two-week trip without paying a fee! There are lots of other reasons to love Jet Blue (not a shill, just a fan!): above all, the spacious seats and friendly staff. They even provide snacks and never bitch or moan or snarl if you ask for something to drink or a second bag of chips!

Upon my arrival at my parents' humble abode in Boulder, Colorado, I learned that, in addition to her many other health issues, Jula is allergic to perfume! My mom has been seriously worried that Jula might die over the summer, and the last thing I want on my hands is a dead dog, so I promised her that I would not wear any perfume. And I have not.

Except that I have! During this "no perfume" period, I have begun to pay a lot of attention to stuff around me that is really very strongly perfumed. Take the Dial soap I bought upon my arrival. I meant to buy white Dial, which is my favorite body soap. I did buy white Dial Soap. Unfortunately, I did not read the fine print. The white Dial I bought is not the white Dial I like. It has a "Spring Water" scent which smells an awful lot like an aquatic cologne. It's really very strongly scented, to the point of evoking memories of Acqua di Gio and sundry other aquatics which make me feel a bit queasy if not downright seasick. I bought a package of  8 bars, having just run out chez moi, and knowing that I would have to buy some anyway upon my return to Boston. I debated taking the 7 unopened bars back to the store to exchange, but I'm not sure that they would. Plus it was on sale, so it did not cost that much to begin with. I probably should have just bought another package of the regular white Dial, but I have been experimenting on myself to see whether my attitude toward this particular scent will change with repeated usage. Will I become less or more intolerant of this scent, which seems clearly to boast calone? One thing is clear: I seem to be spending a lot more time rinsing than I ever did before...

Then there is the hand soap in my mom's upstairs bathroom. It, too, smells like some sort of aquatic cologne! Is this a conspiracy being perpetrated by Procter & Gamble? I ask most sincerely. The laundry detergent is "Free", that is, devoid of any added scent. Trouble is, the scent of unscented laundry detergent is not the scent of water. It's more like a kind of plastic, it seems to me.

There are lots of other scents here, too. Need I even mention that dogs smell like ... dogs? My mom took Jula to the groomer the day before my arrival. So for one day she smelled like freshly shampooed hair. According to my mom, the groomers use the only shampoo which Jula can tolerate, and it is very lightly scented, but not completely unscented, at least according to my nose. It does not smell like Bedhead shampoo, for example, which in my experience contains a full 100ml bottle of perfume in each large bottle of shampoo or conditioner. That stuff is seriously strong and will and does conflict with some perfumes, so it's important to plan ahead before using such hair products.

Which reminds me of a funny new trend. Hair perfume. That's right. Companies both mainstream and niche are now offering perfume for hair! This strikes me as funny, as so many hair products with functional benefits are already extremely heavily scented with full-on perfume. One glaring example comes to mind: Oscar Blandi leave-in conditioner smells EXACTLY like a jasmine soliflore. In fact, it is a jasmine soliflore, as far as I can tell. Why Jasmine Absolute is explicitly listed among the ingredients! (Apparently the Oscar Blandi company is not privy to the latest "scientific findings" of the IFRA...) But it also conditions the hair. I'm not sure about the hair perfumes being sold by Frédéric Malle, et al. Are they also hair products? I'll have to look more closely into that, but now that I'm on a rambling roll, there's no stopping for a Google fact-finding mission.

So dogs. Yes, dogs will be dogs, and dogs will smell like dogs. To dog owners, who are nearly by definition dog lovers--except for the small contingent of Hitler wannabes who upbraid their dogs for such crimes as, well, being dogs--the scent of dogs is probably a welcome one. To me, I have to admit: it is not. I do not like the smell of dogs. It's a natural scent which may overlap with dirty musk to some extent, so I'm not being a dog bigot here. It's a matter of scent preference, and I am on record as not liking dirty musk perfumes. So I'm not really picking on dogs. I just don't happen to like that particular scent. A chacun son goût...


(part 2)

Is Perfume Make-up? The Strange Case of Scented Nail Polish

It appears that the "perfume is art" crowd are being given a run for their money by an opposing force no doubt championed much more vigorously by the corporatized fragrance industry. Perfume in some circles has now become make-up! 

I recently happened upon an advertisement for a new and unexpected product while flipping through one of the many worthless magazines littering my apartment. I receive a lot of magazines in part because Fragrancenet offers a free subscription with every purchase. So that's how I ended up with lengthy, multiyear subscriptions to such publications as Cosmopolitan, Martha Stewart Living, Every Day with Rachel Ray, Better Homes & Gardens, and the magazine in which this advertisement appeared: Allure, which is devoted above all to make-up. The only magazine perhaps even more ridiculous and yet frighteningly a sign of the post-post-modern, SSRI, Twitter-twenty-first-century times may be Lucky, which is dedicated to ... drum roll ... shopping!

This is a perfect example of why I do find myself leafing rapidly through an issue of this sort of magazine before dropping it into the vertical. Who knows what one may learn about contemporary culture, society, and mores? In this case, I learned that, unbelievably enough, there is now a perfumed nail polish being made by Revlon, in its special Parfumerie line.

I was initially thinking about simply approaching this topic from a purely philosophical perspective: Is perfume make-up, after all? Is it perhaps not entirely coincidental that Chandler Burr's disappearance from the Museum of Arts and Design was approximately concomitant with the appearance of perfumed nail polish on the market? To be honest, I'm not sure when Revlon's Parfumerie collection was launched, but I do believe that Chandler Burr's fifteen minutes of fame as a "perfume is art" theorist have now elapsed.

Does this mean that the powerful "perfume is a toiletry" lobby which exerts enormous influence on the industry--and indeed perhaps is identical with the mainstream fragrance industry--has won out? This development may be hailed or scorned, but in all likelihood that will depend upon one's prior beliefs about "perfume as art" and "perfume as toiletry". 

If you already believe that all perfume is directly connected to all cologne, which began as a way for stinky people without access to frequent baths to cover up their own bodily stench, and therefore is obviously a toiletry (being a bath surrogate), then the sight of the above Revlon Parfumerie advertisement is probably not going to bother you in the least.

If, on the other hand, you prefer to think of perfume as something loftier, something higher, something transcendent, perhaps something that someone like Jackson Pollock might create, then the sight of this little splotch of Revlon Parfumerie Beachy, which may in fact resemble some artist's work of art somewhere, may be a bit disconcerting:

As usual, sherapop manages to navigate her epistemological way through this untenable duality. Yes, of course, perfume is used as a way of masking body odor or else to add some where there is none. Musk and ambergris perfumes, anyone? Yes, of course, people like Daniela Andrier and Bertrand Duchaufour and Jean-Claude Elléna and Dominique Ropion and (add your favorite perfumer) __________________ are creative spirits and bursting with talent. But none of either of these two ways of looking at perfume--as a "mere" toiletry or as an exalted "art""--tells the whole story. The truth, my fragrant friends, is that 

Perfume is perfume!

As a toiletry, the Revlon Parfumerie project is an epic fail. Why? Because the dried perfume-enamel amalgamate, which I painted onto the back of an envelope--I figured that there was no need to risk the test on my own nails, especially with bedtime on the horizon--smells just like nail polish! 

Anyone who has ever used nail polish is aware--or was at one time--of its dangerously potent fumes, so volatile and intense that it's difficult to suppress the suspicion that it may very well be causing brain cell damage each and every time that it is used. Hopefully not, but let's face it, the scent differs from that of glue (as in glue sniffing) in degree, not in kind.

I find, in fact, that this Revlon Parfumerie Beachy, which I selected thinking that it might possibly smell like Lilly Pulitzer Beachy, or perhaps even Bond no 9 Fire Island, occupies an olfactory coordinate not terribly far from the opening of Lanvin Rumeur. But that's only because that perfume opens just like the scent of a chemical industry waste factory.

Yes, I am afraid that the Revlon experiment in product multitasking has failed in this case. No worries, though, because it will only be a matter of time before the experiment is undertaken again, by day laborers working under the yoke of some driven triple-A personality CEO, and eventually some synthetic organic chemist somewhere will devise a way to insert a scent more powerful than the scent of nail polish into the nail polish so that one can buy a single product under the guise of either perfume or nail polish (what's your pleasure?) rather than buying both.

Wait a minute! How, then, could it be that the cosmetic industry is producing such a thing, working to decrease the amount of wallet share which they can siphon off the readers of Allure magazine? This case reminds me in some ways of the Starbucks Via project. Why is Starbucks trying to sell to its very own customers products which obviate the need for them to stop off in the stores to buy $6 cups of coffee? 

The answer, my fragrant friends, in both cases, is that these companies are after total global hegemonic control. Whatever beverage you may choose to drink, and in whatever format, Starbucks will be there for you.  (Lest you forget, they acquired both Tazo and Teavana!) And whichever make-up or fragrance product you choose to spend the discretionary share of your paltry Friday take-home pay on, Revlon wants to be in on it!

Between Charybdis and Scylla: Is There a Third Way?

The Professor's Signature Scent:
Escentric Molecules Molecule 01

Thurston Howell III's Signature Scent:
Creed Royal English Leather (vintage!)

???

The world of perfumery is swiftly transforming in so many ways that it is becoming progressively more difficult to navigate the territory, as it shifts constantly under one's feet. The once-independent designer houses have now nearly all been swallowed up by corporate giants such as Procter & Gamble, Coty, Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, Puig, L'Oréal, and LVMH. Are the perfumes being produced by designer houses under the aegis of corporate masters more or less the same as they were before? Or have they essentially and irrevocably changed?

Perhaps no grand and sweeping generalizations can be made, but we can consider individual cases and may discover that the perfumes all being signed by one perfumer under LVMH but issuing from ostensibly distinct houses are converging in style. Similarly, we may take note of the convergence of Rochas and Patou under P&G, or that of Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein under Coty Prestige.

Even while being conducted by publicly traded companies, the business of perfumery remains a secretive one, and it may not be possible to ascertain whether corporate suits get the final say on what happens after a perfume has been approved by the house's creative director. We really don't know. All that we can do is attempt to divine what is going on at P&G, Coty Prestige, LVMH, and the other corporations now in on the perfume business game. We can do this by considering the quality and type of perfumes being purveyed by the houses under their control.

The Skipper's Signature Scent:
P&G Old Spice

Recent restrictions placed by the IFRA on the use of what formerly were regarded as indispensable materials to the twentieth-century classic perfumes have produced a rash of reformulations, which may or may not have been undertaken first and foremost in order to comply with these industry standards. After all, reformulations were carried out by companies long before the IFRA began championing these restrictions—indeed, long before the IFRA existed.

All of this leads some critics to suspect that the IFRA serves the interests of those who stand to benefit from the progressively more abstract surrogates for natural materials being used in perfumery today. When self-appointed "experts" tout the allegedly superior quality of perfumes made with "abstract" florals, such as Estée Lauder Beyond Paradise, it is natural to be suspicious of their intentions, given the seemingly inexorable march forward in the twenty-first century toward maximum abstraction.

It's bound to be a lot less expensive to produce perfumes in a laboratory than it is to harvest tons of flower petals and extract from them the essence of the scent via a labor-intensive method such as enfleurage. Yes, abstract florals are superior from a purely business perspective, which sees only the bottom line. But our noses don't care about dollars and cents; they care about scents.

These sorts of fundamental changes—on the one hand, corporate control of houses; on the other other hand, a move to use more and more synthetic materials in modern perfumery—have generated a fair amount of disgruntlement among perfumistas and various kinds of response. Two very clear and distinct—and diametrically opposed—approaches have been marked out by a couple of my favorite perfume writers, Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos and Bigsly at Bigslyfragrance. If you have not yet had the pleasure of reading these gentlemen, I encourage you to visit their blogs where they have carefully and meticulously argued for their respective positions. I have certain sympathies with each of their approaches, but what I most love about reading them is that they offer so many intelligent reasons that I invariably find myself questioning my own beliefs and sometimes even swaying back and forth like a pendulum. It's great fun to read them because they disagree so deeply and yet both seem so eminently reasonable. It also does not hurt that they have excellent senses of humor...

Mr. Ross and Mr. Bigsly may not be philosophers by profession, but they are truly philosophical in spirit. They are what I call "olfactory truth seekers" because they relentlessly examine the state of perfumery through the application of their searching intellect to the many puzzles which arise as the terrain evolves incessantly. They are not engaging in this search for truth with any ulterior motive such as profit in mind. They are not shills, nor are they starf*cks. They call it as they see it, and although they disagree about nearly everything, they do so thoughtfully, offering reasons and adducing evidence for their bold contentions. It is refreshing to read what both of these thinkers have to say because, whether or not one agrees with their views, it cannot be denied that they are very well thought through.

I do not wish to summarize the perspectives of Bryan and Bigsly, only to encourage you to brew yourself up a stout cup of dark roast coffee and spend some time at their blogs. Here I prefer to generalize a bit, following the From Pyrgos and the Bigslyfragrance approaches to their farthest limits. I do not mean to suggest that the ideas which I shall discuss here are subscribed to precisely by either writer. In fact, the two approaches which I'd like to outline may be viewed as caricatures of sorts (hence, the selection of images, above...), lacking the subtlety to be found within their texts. My hope is to outline two general approaches which illustrate two different and very distinct tendencies: for and against sticking with tradition or, in the case of perfume, vintage.

That was then. This is now.

No one can deny that perfumery and perfumes have changed radically over the course of the past decade. Pre-Y2K perfumery arguably produced many if not mostly perfumes of integrity, which can be attributed in large part, in my view, to the very fact that they were composed over years by professional perfumers. Back then, a perfume launch was an event. Today, it is tantamount to a Tweet.

Post-Y2K perfumery is really all over the map, literally and figuratively. Not only has the perfumery branch of once-independent design houses been handed over to corporate giants, but at the same time, the niche scene has transformed beyond all recognition. Niche houses began, it is sometimes said, with L'Artisan Parfumeur back in the 1970s. At that time, "niche" meant “exclusive” and “difficult to find and access”. In the age of cybershopping, virtually nothing is difficult to find or access anymore. What, then, does it mean to be “niche”?

A further complicating factor is that at this point in history everyone and his mother, brother, cousin, and uncle appears to be jumping on the perfume business bandwagon, asserting their claim to a piece of the perfume pie as "creative directors" of “niche” firms. As a result, 'niche' has become more of a marketing term than anything else. Much niche (non-mainstream) perfume is relatively expensive, but the term can also be applied to some scattered houses offering less-expensive wares, including several of the traditional houses of France, some of which remain independent and based in and around Grasse. Houses such as Molinard and Fragonard appear to be overlooked by some snobs precisely because of the modest cost of their wares.

At the traditional and designer houses now under corporate control, such as LVMH-owned Guerlain and Christian Dior, there has been a radical increase in the number of launches, including seemingly endless lists of flankers and limited edition releases. In tandem, the number of new niche houses continues to augment, and each arrives on the scene touting the virtues and distinctness of their vision, with a slate of multiple, sometimes dozens of, perfumes. What to do?

One way of approaching the situation is to look back to the great classics, and track them down wherever they may be found. Vintage hunters spend untold amounts of time and energy in their quest for the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Often what they find is not gold but pyrite, but sometimes they have no way of knowing that this is the case because there is nothing to compare it to which might validate—or refute—the seller's claim to absolute integrity and authenticity. Nonetheless, the hunt continues.

Vintage hunting is to some a form of low-stakes gambling. Something about gambling appeals naturally to human beings, and for some people, hanging out at ebay and bidding in auctions is as much a form of entertainment as it is a way of acquiring vintage treasure. Of course, victory in this game is to have "scored" the rare and splendid jewel among the wide array of objects being sold there. Ebay has done a lot to make participation in the auctions a positive experience by implementing rules to prevent fraudulent transactions and protect consumers.

I have laid out the reasons for my skepticism about the general enterprise of hunting down remaining bottles of the vintage classics in The Question of Vintage. Probably my biggest concern regarding the hawks themselves is the very fact that people should be selling their supposed masterpieces and treasures at all. This implies that they are not great amateurs of perfume. But if they do not value perfume, then they may think that dilution or other other forms of tampering are perfectly fine. They may truly believe that “no one will notice” because they would not notice. Even stronger grounds for skepticism lie in the nature of the substances which make up perfumes: they degrade, and hence change, over time. It's anyone's guess what a perfume produced thirty years ago is going to smell like today, even if it was stored with the utmost vigilance and care.

Please note that I do not deny that, as a form of entertainment, ebay vintage hunting may have a value to the participant which transcends his or her ability to actually score great perfume. I have instead argued that there is something vaguely irrational about this hunt for treasure, given the nature, first, of perfumes, which fall apart over time; and second, sellers, who, being human beings, are subject to vices such as greed and unscrupulousness in their quest to maximize profit.

As a matter of fact, greed and unscrupulousness in the quest to maximize profit are the virtues of Gordon "Greed is Good" Gekko big corporate business types, precisely, I hasten to add, the types of people who head up conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble, Coty Prestige, Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, Puig, L'Oréal, and LVMH. They, too, may not care about the products which they peddle. They, too, may think that it is “no big deal” to remove all of the natural components from the Guerlain Aqua Allegoria launches. “No one will notice,” the person who makes such calls may mutter to himself as he issues an executive decree, in the hope of improving the company's bottom line.

A generally realistic view of human nature would seem to imply that any skepticism which one harbors about the shady gray market operators who trade in now-discontinued, once-classic perfumes, should transfer directly to the purveyors of perfume by the once-independent but now corporate-conglomerate-ruled design houses. Greed and unscrupulousness are everywhere, my fragrant friends, when money is what is at stake.

I part company with both the vintage hunters and those who "believe in" the possibility of relaunches of the classics by the companies currently holding the keys to the safes where perfume formulas are stored. Call me a cynic, but I trust neither the design houses under management by megacorporations, nor the peddlers of old vintage perfumes at ebay and elsewhere. And, with my solid background in chemistry, I found it preposterous that so few people acknowledge the reality of chemical degradation, which virtually guarantees that once-classic perfumes produced years ago are no longer the same.

Even when the peddlers are honest, they have no control over the condition of the perfumes which they peddle, which have changed hands many times over the course of the decades since the perfumes were produced, adding yet more cause for skepticism. As for the houses “under new management”: it's anyone's guess what the new boss thinks—or likes and values. Maybe he believes that Joy edp should be preserved in tact. Maybe he finds it stinky and will therefore order his minions to cut costs and “tame” the perfume in one fell reformulation.

We've seen plenty of blunders on the part LVMH, just to pick on them again. They discontinued nearly every Fendi perfume upon acquisition of that house. Clearly, someone did a miscalculation in cases such as Theorema. Perhaps the perfume did not do well because it was poorly distributed and marketed. Perhaps a more savvy marketing team could have squeezed some profit out of that beautiful perfume. No, the decision was made: destroy it. Now, if they announce that they are going to “bring back” Theorema, should we trust those very same decision makers? Or should we be skeptical that the same fools who axed the perfume in the first place (and therefore did not recognize its greatness), may also see nothing wrong with fobbing off a muzak version and calling it a relaunch of the original?

Who knows? Maybe the relaunches will be good. Once again, it's a numbers game, but when we see poor decision after poor decision being made by the powers that be (the renaming of Miss Dior Chérie as Miss Dior? Pray tell, whose call was that????), then it becomes less and less rational to believe that we should have any hope for anything that they will do in the future. This is not to deny outright that a relaunch might be good, but it is to predict, based on past behavior that it is not likely to be. That's just a question of probability based on prior experience. It's not irrational doom and gloom, it seems to me.

There are other possibilities as well. Should we perhaps hold out hope for tweaked relaunches of old classics and reformulations undertaken in order to appeal to new, modern sensibilities? This would seem to be an amalgamation of the vintage-valuing with the forward-looking approach, recognizing that "it's not 1988 anymore", but upholding the sanctity of the classics. The nature of consumerism has changed radically over the course of the past decade, with cybershopping achieving its furthest expression in the recent phenomenon of social shopping, made possible by the capitalization of sites such as Facebook and a general frenzy among cyberworld denizens to share with their "friends" everything they do, including buy.

Mrs. Howell's Signature Scent:
Why Chanel No 5, of course!

The same forward-looking attitude applies equally well, however, to the science of perfumery, as synthetic organic chemists endeavor to create new molecules for use in perfumes to supplant rare and expensive natural materials and also to create brand new scents. Indeed, the story of Chanel No 5 is that of a new idea applied to the perfume of its time. By adding aldehydes, never before successfully used (they had been used, but not widely), to a floral perfume, a classic icon of twentieth-century perfumery was born. Gabrielle Chanel proclaimed that women had no business smelling like flowers, and derided the “backwards” nineteenth-century soliflores dominating the perfume scene.

Maryann's Signature Scent:
Parfums Berdoues Violettes de Toulouse

There is a curious logical tension, it seems to me, in believing in the possibility of excellent relaunches of vintage classics, which seems to involve the very same nostalgia of which vintage hunters are sometimes accused. Should we really be wearing the perfumes of the twentieth century in the twenty-first century? Or is it not time to move on?

Like it or not, perfumery continues to march ahead and will soon be leaving "classics" such as Chanel No 5 behind—not only because using the precious jasmine of Grasse will be financially prohibitive from the perspective of the suits running the businesses, but also because consumers' preferences will continue to be transformed as new scents are created and widely marketed and disseminated in venues such as Sephora, which literally create tastes in mass market perfume.

Nowhere is the dependence of the range of perfumes available upon the whims of fashion—as molded by companies—better illustrated than in the current oud craze. The “need for oud” has been created out of nothing for people with no knowledge of that substance whatsoever by perfume companies! What next? Elves' sweat and fairies' breath?

The formidable forces of fashion explain how sweet laundry scents and gourmand and fruitchouli scents (in the model of Thierry Mugler Angel) before them flooded the market. Consumers came to view those types of scents as "appropriate" perfumes. The reason why people describe loud, megasillage perfumes as "so 1980s" is because back then people wore those scents, but very few people do today.

These changes took place not because Christian Dior Poison was objectively good twenty years ago and has now become objectively bad. No, this came about only because fashions change, and perfumery is part and parcel of fashion, as should be obvious by the very fact that so many clothing design houses launch perfumes as accessories of sorts, to embellish their line, not to replace it.

This also explains why designer after designer, beginning with Gabrielle Chanel, have handed over the perfumery end of their businesses to other parties to tend to. Fashion designers are first and foremost concerned with clothing, not perfume, so it is not that surprising that so many of them have handed over control of their perfumery branch to major corporations in the twenty-first century. From Calvin Klein to Fendi to Kenzo to Givenchy, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent, the perfumery end of things has been delegated to another entity, the multicorporate conglomerate.

The Third Way

If all of these people are selling their rights to control their perfume output, then whom ought we to trust? My view is that the way forward is not to hunt down decaying bottles of juice from times past, nor to hold out hope that the new corporate masters have any intrinsic interest in producing excellent perfume. The only people who really care about producing excellent perfume, in their heart of hearts, are perfumers. The third way which I propose today is to stick with the independents, where there really and truly is a perfumer in the house, not just a bunch of hired hack-chemists working under restrictions imposed upon them by their employer.

Independent perfumers offer us today the best hope of finding perfume which embodies the integrity found more often than not in early-twentieth century perfumery. Think about it: back then perfumers worked in small ateliers and both composed their elixirs and balanced their own books. They did not issue perfumes as frequently as Tweets. They invested time and energy in their creations rather than producing dozens of perfumes using combinatorial permutations of a set of fixed notes.

All of this may sound vaguely quaint in the twenty-first century, but independent perfumers represent the only case where we have rational grounds for believing that the fresh perfumes will not be either a con job (as in nasty, cheap, and insulting reformulations), or the creation of new tastes to shape a market solely for profit-making purposes (as in the case of launching the scents of laundry and personal hygiene products as perfumes).

There are no good reasons to cling religiously to vintage perfume nor to quixotically hope that the business people in charge of multicorporate conglomerates are somehow going to start caring more about matters olfactory than about their bottom line. Business is driven inexorably by a quest for profit. Nothing is sacred but the bottom line.

In making this proposal, I am emphatically not claiming that all niche houses are purveyors of excellent wares or perfumes of integrity, as I conceive of what all of us are really looking for in the end, whether we tend to look backward, forward, or around us right now. No, the niche scene is filled with façades in front of crass labs where, too, perfumes are being quickly composed and poured into fancy bottles and hyped in part by slapping on exorbitant price tags. So one must tread carefully in this realm as well. Many of the glut of current "niche" ventures will fold like a house of cards in a gust of wind, and their creative directors may move on to running fast-food franchises or selling real estate.

Nonetheless, within the vast sea of niche perfume being pumped out today, there are small islands of true perfumery, where people who are generally committed to producing beautiful things (and you may call them “artists” if you like, but you'll mean that in the pre-twentieth-century sense). That is where we are most likely to find the sorts of perfumes which vintage lovers remember and cherish as they slowly disappear, never to be replaced.

The Third Way, then, is not to look back to the past, nor to dream wistfully of the future, but to look into the true perfumers plying their trade at independent houses today. These people are much more believable than either the anonymous chemists composing at IFF or the “rock star” perfumers attaching their names to dozens of perfumes simultaneously across all categories. In many cases, “super-star” contracted perfumers appear to be signing off on perfumes which are then left to the chemists and accountants to modify with the aim of cutting costs. That would explain how some of the perfumes allegedly created by big names such as Calice Becker and Yann Vasnier are as mediocre as they come.

My advice, for those who wish to find the treasure at the end of the rainbow without having to travel back in time, and for those who are understandably skeptical about future “relaunches” of previously reformulated or discontinued perfumes—reformulated or discontinued in some cases by the very company claiming to be about to “bring them back”—is not to cling to the past, nor to hope for something logically possible but unlikely to occur. Instead, focus on the currently active and identifiable (not dead or anonymous) perfumers who run their own businesses and make their own creative decisions, over which no other person has veto power. There and there alone you will find the integrity of perfume still alive and well, and that is our best chance for finding great perfumes here and now, even today, in the ever-advancing age of abstraction.

Ginger's Signature Scent:
Keiko Mecheri A Fleur de Peau

Carpe Diem!

Screen captures were taken from Gilligan's Island, season 2, episodes 1 &2, 1965.

Entry #19: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

The Is-Ought Problem or Facts versus Values

From no matter of fact does any course of action follow. Descriptions do not produce prescriptions. Values must also be thrown into the mix. This is why it is impossible to argue someone into abiding by morality. They must already affirm the value of a moral perspective, and if they do not appreciate the value of morality, then nothing you can say will convert them to your view. You can show them pictures of atrocities and explain the negative consequences of acting immorally, but they will simply shrug their shoulders and say, "So what?" 

The same division—or unbridgeable chasm—between facts and values explains why you cannot talk anyone into loving or even liking something which they do not love or like. Many people would rather read a genre fiction "page turner" than an abstruse and labyrinthine multilayered and nonlinear nouveau roman. They may affirm the brilliance of the latter (if they understand it), but when it comes time to pick up a book to read onboard a plane en route to a land far away, they may select a paperback book from the bestsellers shelf.

In perfumery, you might recognize that a great deal of technical skill was needed to produce a given creation, but that alone will not make you like it. You might in fact detest it so much that you would never wear it. Nonetheless, we tend to think that the perfumes which we dislike are not good perfumes, because we consider our perceptions to be authoritative, and they are—to us. 

"I know what I like" rings nowhere truer than in the realm of perfume, because at the end of the day, perfume is for wearing, and wearers have personal idiosyncracies and likes and dislikes which appear to determine their evaluations. Our values precede our experience of perfume, not the other way around. 

Philosophers usually talk about the "is-ought" problem as it applies in moral contexts. How can you convince a seasoned killer that what he does is wrong? In fact, you cannot. Once someone has already crossed over the line from within to beyond the pale, he may become even more inclined to do what he has already done in order to prove to himself that there was nothing wrong with what he already did. Indeed, it may be the very act of committing a moral transgression which converts some people to belief in amorality or immorality. 

Can the analogous thing happen with perfume? Can you force yourself to wear a perfume which you truly dislike initially to the point where it becomes familiar and somehow comforting to you? Can you habituate yourself to a scent which you did not initially like? I do not believe that an intrinsically unwearable perfume can work in this case—say something like Estée Lauder Intuition, which in my experience was so unpleasant that I actually returned the bottle for a refund at the counter where I had bought it. That is something which I nearly never do, but I could not bear the thought of wearing Intuition again, as it was an experience akin to forcibly removing my toenails, which, needless to say, I would never choose to do.

However, I do believe that fragrances toward which we are more neutrally inclined are easy to become habituated to. That explains the tsunami of sweet laundry and shampoo and conditioner scents which one finds littering the wall at Sephora these days. People are being slowly habituated to the idea that that sort of composition is perfume. It makes a lot of sense really, when you think about who's in on the perfume business game these days. Procter & Gamble, anyone? 

The very concept of perfume has been transforming as a result of the models being fobbed off on Joe and Jill Q. Consumer, who may go to purchase gifts for each other at Sephora and end up with an aquatic cologne for him and a pink fruity-floral fragrance for her, which they will wear until they are gone, at which point they'll go shopping again and look specifically for what they have already worn—or something like it.

This explains, too, the culture shock on the part of perfumistas whose formative sniffing and wearing experiences pre-dated these new developments. Anyone who is old enough to remember what perfumes were like before the twenty-first century may simply deny that the aromachemical-heavy "stuff" being pumped out of vats into plastic-flower-capped bottles these days is perfume at all.

We are in the midst of a complete breakdown of perfume culture as a result of the fact that many perfumistas do remember the good old days, while at the same time, the ever-encroaching forces of abstraction engendered in part by the IFRA continue to act on everything produced in the mainstream realm. 

Returning to the "is-ought" problem, the fact that many women's fragrances are abstract, pink, fruity-floral fragrances does not imply that they should be. But they are. The question remains: what to do? This is a very deep question which divides perfumistas into two camps well-represented by savvy perfume writers Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos and Bigsly at bigslyfragrance.com. In the not-too-distant future, I'll take up their debate and attempt to navigate a third way between their two seemingly incompatible and irreconcilable approaches. 

Stay tuned...