The Beauty of Bell Curves, with applications to perfume

As of today, September 1, 2013, at 10:34 pm Berlin time, the Parfumo database lists 31,748 perfumes. For the past few months, I have been attempting to pull all of my perfume reviews together in a searchable archive. I'm not quite finished, but as of right now, there are 2,114 reviews. 

The goal of Parfumo appears to be to list all perfumes in existence, whether discontinued or readily available. My goal? Just to travel around the olfactory universe a bit. Do I have any intention of reviewing another 28K perfumes? No, of course not. Maybe I'll call it quits when I reach 3K, but one thing is clear: I have no desire to sniff the vast majority of perfumes in existence. Why? The answer, my fragrant friends, lies in the beautiful bell curve:

Bell curves depict a "normal" or Gaussian distribution of some quality or thing covering a fixed range. They are perfect for evaluations of things which come in all sorts of varieties and specifically when we choose to rate those things using simple numerical scales. I rate perfumes on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being rock bottom scrubber, and 10 being incredibly wonderful, even transcendent. In a normal distribution of things along the x axis, the number of items (shown on the y axis) at the lowest end will be matched by the number of items at the highest end. The ratings eventually drift off to nothingness at both ends when continuous and not discrete measures are used.

Bell curves are useful for handling lots of things in real life, believe it or not. Take people, for example, but let's also stick with perfume. Of the people you happen to encounter in your life, how many of them are completely anosmic? Probably not very many. If we were to graph that trait, I imagine that only a tiny number would be completely anosmic, and it might well match the number of people who are hyperosmic to the point of throwing a fit whenever anyone wears a scent in their presence. Most people fall somewhere in between. 

There are lots of statistical nuances between mean and median, and so forth, but for our purposes, to think about what we should expect when we set out to test perfumes, this simple bell curve is good enough.

The numbers didactically displayed on this particular version of the bell curve indicate that 68% of things fall right down the middle of the range, and 96% of things fill the broad underbelly of the curve. Most things, including perfumes, are average. Some are above average; some are below average. The extreme outliers are the top 2% and the bottom 2%. 

Let's think about those numbers for a moment. If you test 100 perfumes, how many, realistically speaking, should be masterpieces? Well, if perfume ratings are plotted along a normal distribution, then you should expect the number of scrubbers to pretty much equal the number of masterpieces. This is not to say that any two perfume wearers will agree on which ones those are. 

Every single trait, every sensitivity to every scent (and ingredient) included in a perfume, and every single taste can also be understood in terms of a bell curve distribution. Consequently, we should not expect to see all that much convergence in opinions about perfumes, it seems to me. What we should expect, however, in every case, is that to any given perfume wearer, most perfumes should be average. This might even be a tautology.

I have often wondered how I could explain my innate disdain for people who throw temper tantrums about perfumes which they happen not to like. Yes, they are childish, of course, but how and why exactly? The answer, my fragrant friends, lies here in the bell curve. We should rationally expect the worst 2% of all perfumes to be just that. It would be crazy to expect more than 2% of all perfumes to be masterworks, would it not?

Not so fast, sherapop. It's all going to turn on the reviewer. If someone actually expects every perfume to be a masterpiece, then he will be disappointed 98% of the time. On the other hand, if a person has no powers of discrimination, then everything will smell great. Will it not? But what, you may by now be wondering, does the actual perfume rating distribution look like for a real live perfumista?

Inspired by Undina, the reigning Queen of Perfume Stats, I set out this afternoon to plot my very own ratings and determine whether or not I evaluate perfumes numerically in accordance with a normal bell curve distribution. Here's what I found:

As you can clearly see, my ratings lean to the right, relative to a normal distribution. Although my numbers of absolute scrubbers and masterpieces are very similar, I am more generous in bestowing ratings on the wearable perfumes in the broad underbelly of the curve. I give an unexpectedly large number of 6's and 7's, which is probably because my approach is to award ratings based on an "all things considered" system. I take into account the cost of perfumes which strike me as an exceptionally good value, and as a result, I'll give a Molinard a 7 which I might have given only a 5 or a 6, had it not cost me nearly nothing.

All of this makes me wonder whether I should try to not do "all things considered" ratings. Until I remember that people may read my reviews, and they may be looking for some useful advice, especially if they already know that we have similar tastes. Keeping those people in mind, I feel that I should continue on with my "all things considered" ratings. So if a perfume costs $800 and smells like an average designer launch, then I may give it only a 4 instead of a 5, even though it is completely wearable. In this way I am basically expressing my opinion that it is not a perfume which I would recommend purchasing. Why? Because I don't see the point in spending $800 for a perfume very similar to a perfume which costs $80.

There is another possible explanation for the right-side heaviness of my curve: I do not seek out perfumes which I am fairly sure a priori will not smell good. I tried a couple of the Coty drugstore scents, and they were so horrible that I simply decided to avoid liquids in that general territory. This means that I am not really sampling a normal distribution of perfumes. I am not randomly spritzing in the dark. I decide to sample some perfumes and not others, and that selection process weeds out more of the perfumes that might have shown up in the 2, 3, and 4 rating region of the curve. 

I also test a lot of niche perfumes. Whether or not I happen to think that they are great, they are often very nice, and because I care very much about high quality ingredients, even a solid niche perfume which does not break any new ground may receive a 7 from me, just because it smells so nice. 

Now I'd like to open up the floor. What does your ratings distribution look like, and why? Can you think of other explanations for the leaning to the right of mine? Of course, I could just be indiscriminate, but that does not explain why the far left and the far right do appear to be normal. Or are they? I need to do a quick calculation. 

The total number of reviews is 2114, so 2% is about 42! This means that my extreme termini are unexpectedly low--at both ends of the graph. 

So it's really true, after all: Most perfumes are average! Or at least I believe that they are...

A Tendentious History of the World's Most Hyped Perfume

Reflections on the state of perfume writing occasioned by my reading of

The Secret of Chanel no. 5: 

The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume (2010), by Tilar J. Mazzeo

There is a serious dearth of books on perfume. Trust me, I've looked. A short stack of books are read and praised by perfume lovers because only that short stack exists. To be honest, most of the best of a bad bunch are not really up to snuff, if compared to works about other cultural phenomena written by serious critics with the appropriate theoretical background to support their claim to expertise regarding the topics about which they write.

Part of the problem in the area of perfume—aside from the gushing enthusiasm which seems to substitute in some cases for training and education—appears to be a general deficit of critical acumen among people who are really quite good at self-promotion but much less good at digging very deeply into the topic of perfume. They exalt themselves as experts and then, because there is no one around to dispute such claims, readers simply accept that the authors are what their publishers vociferously proclaim: the experts.

Perfumistas brush all of this aside. They don't care about credentials. “All you need is love” is what many apparently think. Guide groupies bristle at anyone's attempt to point out that personal attacks on perfumers and houses are not a form of valid criticism—and indeed exemplify fallacious reasoning. It all becomes ugly when critics attempt to criticize the pseudo-critics. That, it seems, is not permitted. We must love all perfume lovers who are attempting to elevate the object of our love—no matter how inept and self-defeating their efforts may be in the grand scheme of things, beyond the cloistered community of full-fledged fragrance fans.

Chandler Burr studied business and economics before studying, well, Luca Turin, after which Burr was curiously named the perfume critic for the New York Times. Was that appointment, too, like his current post as The Curator of the Department of Olfactory Art at MAD, his very own idea and a result of his own pitch to have himself appointed to the position? I ask because it has been years since Burr departed from The Times, and no person has yet been named to fill the “vacancy”. Is it that no one can fill his shoes? Or is it that no one else has dared to assert that their undying love of perfume qualifies them to bear the impressive title “The New York Times Perfume Critic”?

The nearly total absence of serious intellectuals directing their energies to the topic of perfume has given rise to what looks rather like a Lockean property first-dibs expertise schema, whereby the first people to have the bravura to label themselves “experts” become through that very act accepted by the ignorant masses as “the experts” about perfume.

There has been no need for intellectual rigor in writing about perfume to this point in history for the simple fact that there are so few perfume books in existence that virtually anything which anyone manages to get published will be praised as great by a small cluster of perfume enthusiasts—dare I say fanatics? In a culture which continues to regard perfume as a mere toiletry—or, at best, an accessory—anyone who cares (obsesses?) enough about perfume to be buying books about the subject is not going to be all that selective. They do not have that luxury, again, for the simple reason that perfume has yet to be taken seriously as an object of sustained intellectual critique.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here: no one—aside from perfume junkies and geeks—seems to be taking perfume very seriously as a cultural phenomenon, one worthy of sustained critique, precisely because no one aside from juice-addicted perfumistas takes perfume seriously at all, with the notable exception, of course, of those who are in the business of perfumery for the bountiful profits which it reaps.

There are a few astute bloggers here and there, but in the published book category, not much has happened yet. Pseudo-intellectual drivel spewed out about perfume by slick public relations teams deployed in the service of a few aspirants to wealth and fame (and free perfume!) does not help in this regard. Outsiders, the non-perfumistas, cannot take diaphanous perfume marketing campaigns masquerading as high theory seriously. And why, after all, should they?

So there is Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, which portends to be a work of criticism and vaunts being the “only” book of its kind. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the only book of its kind is both the best and the worst of its kind, and until better books come along, many people will continue to praise that work as great. In reality, Turin and Sanchez do no more in that book than to broadcast their own tastes and promote some perfumers and their creations, while demoting others in rude and sometimes vicious terms.

This point is obviously lost on many perfumistas, but in every other realm of inquiry there is a clear distinction between criticism, on the one hand, and slander and insults, on the other. Unfortunately Turin and Sanchez do not appear to recognize that distinction and brazenly and boorishly conflate the two, offering ad hominem attacks and personal insults in lieu of arguments or principles of aesthetic criticism. An abundance of passion and enthusiasm is not an effective substitute for reason, and being ready and willing to yell louder than anyone around does not imply that one is right.

Books for and by perfume lovers tend to show their bias—and pretension—on their covers. Turin and Sanchez allowed their musings to be published under the highly misleading title Perfume: The A-Z Guide, when it is nothing of the kind. The title is in fact triply mendacious. Fortunately, members of online fragrance communities are slowly becoming more savvy through their exposure to a wide range of reviews written by many different people. As a result, even some of the former Guide groupies appear to be coming to the recognition that, however passionate Turin and Sanchez (and Chandler Burr after them) may be about perfume, they are ultimately, at the end of the day, attempting to persuade readers that idiosyncratic and subjective values and tastes are objective truths.

Another Case in Point

Provocative titles sell books, as many consumers do judge a book by its cover. Tilar Mazzeo's The Secret of Chanel no. 5: The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume (2010) offers another example of the same. To sell books, one must have a claim to exclusivity and expertise—or pay deference to those who have made that their claim to fame. Chandler Burr's name is emblazoned prominently as the author of the first blurb on the back cover of The Secret of Chanel no. 5. Mazzeo thanks Turin and Sanchez on her acknowledgment page for having taken the time to speak with her. This is how the “expert” system works, too, in academia, where the back-cover blurb industry is frankly laughable, so perhaps I should not be surprised. The difference is that there are no checks and balances of any kind in the tiny universe of entirely self-appointed perfume critics.

What is odd about this book is not that Mazzeo is a true believer in the greatness of Chanel no 5—who but a true believer would bother to attempt to write the cultural history of a single perfume? No, what is a bit surprising is only that her preaching to the choir should be so very flagrant. Leaps of logic abound throughout the story of Chanel no 5 as told by Mazzeo, as she sets up what appear to be genuinely intriguing possibilities, and then in a short phrase resolves the question at issue with the bald statement, in effect, that Chanel no 5 is great, what is both the first premise and the conclusion of this work.

In this regard, Mazzeo provides a book-length example of the informal fallacy known as “begging the question”: to assume as a first premise what one is attempting to demonstrate. (As an aside, in the vernacular, “begging the question” has come recently to be used by people as a substitute for “raising the question”. So one often sees the observation that “this begs the question...,” after which a question is posed.)

Unfortunately, all of the leaps in Mazzeo's “history” lean toward the protectionist side, minimizing any detraction from the hypothesis of the greatness of this perfume and its creator, all of which leads one to suspect that this is not at all “The Unauthorized Biography,” as the inside jacket of the book enticingly boasts, but the “thoroughly approved by the suits at Chanel” version of the story. Devotees will complain (as did Guide groupies before them): "So what? If you want a better book, why don't you write one?”

This sort of response, according to which it is somehow gauche or inappropriate to criticize already published books, that the only acceptable response is to publish another one to replace it, misunderstands the nature of criticism. You publish a book, and you put it out there in the world to be read. Some people will disagree with what you say and call you out on your false, and in some cases fraudulent, claims. That's the chance that you take.

Is the solution to stuff critics' mouths with socks and duct tape them shut? No, it is not. Is the only acceptable response to a mediocre book to publish a better book on the same topic but which avoids making the same mistakes? No, it is not. A critic may not have the interest or desire to devote the years of research needed to get to the bottom of the question. That does not mean that she is required to accept as gospel whatever the shucksters say.

There is a genuinely interesting question here: why is Chanel no. 5 so popular and famous? Well, to anyone familiar with even the broadest contours of the business of perfumery—or business more generally—it might seem that the obvious answer, superlative marketing and hype, should indeed be the best explanation of this perfume's phenomenal success. But, no, Mazzeo “informs” the reader: it is not just marketing; it is not just hype. It is that Chanel no 5 is something somehow transcendent. But is it, even according to Mazzeo's own marshaling of the facts?

Gabrielle Chanel granted control of the perfume branch of her eponymous company to the Wertheimer brothers in exchange for a percentage of profits paid back to her. Why? Because she wanted to focus on fashion, not the production and distribution of perfume. When the perfume became more popular and profitable than her haute couture, Chanel came to experience seller's remorse. This sort of thing is not at all uncommon in the history of business. The person who came up with the idea of Victoria's Secret, a company amazingly devoted solely and unashamedly to lingerie, so that ordinary women could walk into the store without feeling like a whore, sold the idea to someone else who developed it to resounding success. The woman who masterminded the root idea of The Body Shop, also sold her rights, and we all know how that story ended, with stores in cities all over the world. Even Facebook is said to have derived from the root idea of a couple of Mark Zuckerberg's cohorts at Harvard. (See The Social Network (2010), if you are unfamiliar with the story.) What matters in all of these cases is not the bright idea, but how it is nurtured and capitalized upon. Bright ideas are a dime a dozen. Entrepreneurs take such ideas—wherever they came from—and run with them hard and fast.

In the case of Chanel no 5 perfume, the Wertheimer brothers were incredibly savvy at business, more so even than Coco Chanel. The brothers, being Jewish, expatriated right before the German occupation of France to avoid—well, extermination—having sold the majority of the company to an Aryan partner, Félix Amiot, under whose management the company, too, could continue to survive. Under the law at the time, Jewish persons were not permitted to own businesses, and Coco Chanel was ready and willing to do what she needed to regain control of what had by then become a thriving perfumery business. But she was not quite as savvy as her partners, for they beat her to the punch, selling the company before she wrote her infamous letter to carry out her “civic duty” by reporting the Jewish ownership of the perfume branch to the appropriate authorities.

Working in the United States, the Wertheimers continued to devise ingenious marketing strategies. They got the needed Grasse jasmine smuggled out of France and delivered to humble Hoboken. Mazzeo describes how the brothers also decided to stop advertising in the 1940s in order to cut costs. As she tells the story, the natural materials needed to keep the perfume top quality required that corners be cut elsewhere. Of course, they did not reformulate—that would have been to ruin the perfume! Let's see, what would the Chanel company line on reformulation be, I wonder? I believe that it would be in their best interests to deny that the perfume was ever reformulated in any way. Until, of course, that becomes impossible. With the end of the use of natural musk in perfumery, reformulation became ineluctable, but Mazzeo assures the reader near the end of her tale:

Chanel No. 5 fans need not worry, though, because Chanel No. 5 still has those rich, warm scents of skin and that note of intense sensuality that Coco Chanel always wanted. As Christopher Sheldrake explains, while those nitromusks were wonderful, powerful, and inexpensive, they were not irreplaceable. There are ways to re-create their warmth and powdery textures in a perfume. It's just that they can't be replaced on the cheap, and most fragrance houses aren't prepared to spend the money. And, as perfumer Virginia Bonofiglio quips, "You can't make cheap that smells like Chanel No. 5."

In discussing the restrictions imposed by the IFRA regarding the use of jasmine in perfume, Matteo assures the reader, again:

New IFRA allergy restrictions won't threaten the perfume either, because for several years researchers at Chanel have been committed to finding a permanent solution. Among those hundreds of molecules in natural jasmine, it is only one or two that have the potential to cause even the most sensitive among us any problems. Creating a synthetic jasmine as nuanced and subtle as the natural jasmine of Grasse would be an impossible undertaking, but breeding just one or two molecules out of a plant or finding a technique to remove one or two molecules from an extract is entirely possible. Soon, Chanel hopes simply to have resolved the problem of jasmine sensitivity entirely. They hope that, eventually, the jasmine from Grasse will be something anyone can wear without hesitation—no matter how daringly high the doses.

For now, the legacy of the perfume is safe. Despite changes around it, the world's most famous fragrance remains essentially unchanged and timeless.

Goodbye scholarship. Hello, marketing text! And three cheers for GMOs!

To return to the World War II scenario, Matteo explains that rather than compromising the quality of the perfume through cheapening its formula, the Wertheimers instead undertook an initiative which made Chanel no 5 not just profitable, but universally loved: they distributed the perfume through the same channels—the military commissaries or PXs—which delivered food and cigarettes to the troops abroad, wherever they were stationed. Soldiers bought up the perfume for their mistresses or their loved ones back home, and by the end of the war, every woman, it seems, as Mazzeo tells the story, wanted nothing more ardently than a bottle of Chanel no 5—perhaps even more than world peace!

The question which Mazzeo does not answer is this: if it is true that the Wertheimers were so keen to sell as many bottles as possible, and if they knew that their new and vast client base had no perfume sophistication whatsoever, then why in the world would they not reformulate, so as to cut costs further and dramatically increase profits? No, Mazzeo insists. They would never have done such a thing.

Throughout the book, Mazzeo deflects any worries about any possible compromises to the formula of Chanel no 5 in exactly the same way: by flatly denying that they ever took place. Unfortunately, her grounds for this denial appear to be no and more less than her own fervent belief in the continuous integrity of the perfume, through thick and thin, and even at its low point, when the perfume had come to be broadly distributed through American drugstores.

As we all know, the other perfumes which went the drugstore route—consider the sad case of what once were the Coty classics—were horrifically reformulated and never restored. Reformulation in other cases has been a one-way street. Mazzeo simply denies that it ever took place at all in the case of Chanel no 5—despite the fact that it was being sold alongside other ghastly reformulations at the drugstore at the same time.

It is true, of course, that Chanel no 5 is in much better shape today than, say, Coty Muguet des Bois or Emeraude or Nina Ricci L'Air du Temps or... the list goes on and on. But that does not show that Chanel no 5 was never being sold in an inferior formulation while being mass-marketed at drugstores. Instead, it suggests that under subsequent management, the perfume was brought back to its luxury status—and, one surmises, was re-reformulated to the point of at least approximating the original perfume.

What can the grounds be for Mazzeo's insistence on the perfume's uninterrupted integrity beyond the fact that the company denies that reformulation ever took place? The Wertheimers were businessmen, not believers in the sacred immortality of the product which they were peddling. To them, it was a commodity like any other, so why would they cut into their own profits by producing Chanel no 5 at a quality level likely to go altogether unnoticed by the sorts of people—soldiers and their lovers—to whom it was being sold? No answer is given to this question by Mazzeo, because it should be obvious to any of her readers—most of whom are no doubt already true believers—that such an aesthetic crime would be tantamount to murder.

To return to the question of how Chanel no 5 ascended to universal icon status, what Mazzeo does not address is whether the distribution of the perfume to emotionally fraught and love-starved troops—allied and axis alike—would not have done the same for any other perfume distributed in that way. This was what catapulted Chanel no 5 to its status as the number-one selling perfume, where it has stayed since World War II, and what secured what Mazzeo seems to think will be its eternal fame. In truth, the wild popularity of this particular perfume could be explained by the ingenious distribution scheme alone—the creation of this perfume as a coveted object replete with profound significance as a symbol of survival and the scent of victory and relief.

After spending the entire book beating back any possible suggestion to the effect that Chanel no 5 might not be a sacred and transcendent object worthy of our eternal worship—akin to a religious totem—Mazzeo waffles in her final chapter, ascribing the greatness of this perfume to its legion of fans and attempting to anchor it in individual wearers' subjectivity. She writes:

Instead, the secret at the heart of Chanel No. 5 and its continued success is us and our relationship to it. It's the wonderful and curious fact of our collective fascination with this singular perfume for nearly a century and the story of how a scent has been—and remains—capable of producing in so many of us the wish to preserve it. Think of that number: a bottle sold every thirty seconds. It is an astounding economy of desire.

The root problem with this account is that the author simply ignores what would seem to be the real reason why throngs of fans wore and continue to wear this perfume. They were lured by marketing and hype to buy the perfume, or their lovers or husbands were seduced to purchase it for them. Once a bottle of the perfume had found its way to their vanity tray, these women wore Chanel no 5 and then, of course, it did become their own—for many it was and remains a signature scent.

The problem with Mazzeo's logic is that she supposes that the inherent properties of the perfume are the explanation for the perfume's fan base. If that were the case, why in the world would Chanel need to pay Brad Pitt $7 million to jump start sales? Clearly Chanel no 5 does not sell itself. It requires a huge marketing outlay and ingenious schemes for its continuing success. The first generations of wearers are now dead or moribund. What to do next?

Today, in the twenty-first century, as World War II fades from people's memories, the company is trying once again to drum up enthusiasm for a perfume whose time may have come. An overdose of aldehydes combined with precious essences of jasmine and rose was new and exciting in 1921, and the popularity of the perfume was renewed with each successive marketing scheme, but as the last World War II soldiers and survivors take leave of this world, so will the profound existential significance with which Chanel no 5 was infused throughout much of the twentieth century. We still associate this perfume with images of Marilyn Monroe, dead now for more than fifty years, and the models who represented it in subsequent decades: Catherine Deneuve, Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman, Audrey Tatou, and now Brad Pitt. Perhaps Pitt will be the nail in this coffin.

Needless to say, I am not a believer and was not converted by Tilar Mazzeo's book to the view that the resplendent success of Chanel no 5, a good perfume to be sure, has more to do with its allegedly divine beauty than with how it was promoted and distributed throughout the twentieth century. If you are a true believer, then you'll surely read this book as the welcome revelation of gospel. You may enjoy Mazzeo's attempt mystically to link the pristine white sheets at Coco's orphanage to the glacial plains of Siberia and the prominent aldehydes featured in Chanel no 5. No harm in that—don't we all like to read what we already believe? But for everyone else, the most plausible answer to the question What is the secret to Chanel no 5's success? remains unchanged by the publication of this book. The answer, in a phrase, is: marketing and hype.

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

Can We Talk? About Perfume?

What is the Language of Perfume?

Perfume is made to wear, just as food is made to eat. However, there is an important distinction between the two: people must eat to survive. Perfume, in contrast, is a luxury product with which the vast majority of human beings past and present have very little experience, if any at all. Most everyone can smell scent and appreciate the olfactory beauty of a field of lavender or a grove of orange trees, just as they can appreciate the sight of those things. But the practice of perfuming oneself arises only in rather complex cultural contexts.

Created scents, or perfumes, like the combinations of sound known as music, are infinitely nuanced and not limited to the objects delineated by us as numerically distinguishable denizens of reality. In nature and in society, scents occur in groups and layers and can be partitioned in various ways, but often they are not, although particularly striking scents become instantly recognizable intersubjectively and can serve as evidence of the presence of a thing. The scent of a cigar lingers for hours in a hallway though the person who puffed on it disappeared long before. The scent of smoke really does signal the likely presence of fire, and natural gas is made by its providers to waft of a rather acrid odor precisely so that people will notice it before they succumb to its deadly effects.

Like burning cigarettes and car exhaust, cough drops and cheese really do have scents. Cherry cough drops smell different from honey lemon cough drops, and some people will know that swiss cheese has a different scent from that of cheddar. True epicureans may even be able to distinguish Jarlsberg from Emmental by scent alone, and yet they may agree that “cheese” in general has a scent which binds various cheeses together more than any of them is bound to anything else.

The same thing happens with perfume, of course. Untutored perfume enthusiasts may rave that a perfume smells “just like Chanel no 5!” even though it contains no aldehydes and in fact smells nothing like it at all to someone with a wider range of experience with perfumes. But sophisticates and dilettantes alike probably can all agree that composed “perfumes” have a smell which makes any two of them closer to each other than either is to the scent of cheese. I am talking here not about facsimile scents such as produced by the house of Demeter, but perfumes composed so as to stand out as distinct from the smells occurring in nature or in human society. (The recently launched perfume Eau de Pizza Hut apparently does not really smell like Pizza Hut, but that's another story.)

We manage somehow to talk about perfumes by appealing to a combination of mutually familiar scents in nature and makeshift fictions devised largely for marketing purposes. In order to sell his perfume to a client, who will then hopefully produce the creation for general consumption, a perfumer must seduce the prospective buyer through the use of provocative metaphors. It will not do to leave it at “this is a beautiful perfume.”

The perfumer needs to weave a story to convince the prospective producer of the perfume that it meets the producer's own criteria for what constitutes beauty. It is also necessary, of course, that the client actually like the scent and believe that others will too, but the perfumer may offer an appealing framework of metaphors through which to understand the new creation and the sorts of images and feelings it is intended to evoke.

The perfumery business has developed in a certain direction in recent decades, with fewer and fewer independent perfumers working in their own atelier-businesses, and more and more contractual arrangements being struck between self-appointed creative directors—often themselves working under the aegis of a large corporation—and the noses whom they enlist to realize their dream. When a perfumer is not given complete creative license but issued a brief of conditions to be satisfied, then it is the perfumer who must produce a scent which somehow reflects the metaphorical dictates of the client. Miuccia Prada, for example, apparently dislikes dirty, skanky scents, which is why all of the members of the Prada Infusion series, created for Prada by Daniela Andrier, smell clean and elegant.

Because the language in which we discuss perfumes was essentially invented by perfumers and their collaborative marketers, it is not really feasible to think about perfume without its attendant scaffold of concepts, including what have come to be termed “notes”. To talk about notes is not to talk about ingredients. In a few cases, perfumers have “shown their cards,” so to speak, by brazenly disclosing that minimalist perfumes such as Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 and Molecule 02 essentially comprise iso-E-super and ambroxan, respectively. In such cases—Juliette Has A Gun Not a Gun is another minimalist ambroxan perfume—the notes are identified as ingredients. But those are exceptions to the general rule.

Usually, in identifying notes, perfumers are not disclosing ingredients, although it is true that all-natural perfumers may be keen to fully list, to the best of their ability, all ingredients on the labels of their creations so that consumers can see which specific chemical substances are found inside the bottle. Marketing and labeling are distinct activities, of course, but in marketing an all-natural perfume, the list of ingredients itself becomes a selling point to those consumers who have decided to make a conscious and concerted effort to avoid poisoning themselves. Far more often than not, however, in both mainstream and niche perfumery, notes are in fact no more and no less than metaphors.

All of this makes it seem rather curious to me that some people—most vociferously and visibly, Chandler Burr, and I am not at all sure whether anyone else agrees with him—should decry, in public displays of apparently righteous indignation (he studied under Luca Turin...), attempts to have meaningful discussions about perfume in terms of notes as somehow insulting to perfumes and their creators. I'm inclined to think precisely the opposite: to claim, as Burr does, that the language of visual arts is the best or most desirable language of discourse to use in coming to terms with perfume would seem to imply that perfume is somehow parasitic on the other arts, when in fact it is entirely independent and sui generis.

No one would use the language of music theory to talk about architecture, and to attempt to do so strikes me as a category mistake. Do buildings have “keys” and “tempos” and “time signatures” and “movements”? Those terms can be applied metaphorically, I suppose—metaphors are infinitely applicable to anything—but to have a meaningful discussion about architecture with other people, rather than simply talking to oneself, it seems best to use the language which has developed along with the enterprise of architecture itself, by the very people who know architecture best: architects.

One can, if one so desires, label Guerlain Jicky as a work of Romanticism; Givency L'Interdit as Abstract Expressionism; Clinique Aromatics Elixir as a product of the “Early American” school; Guy Laroche Drakkar Noir as a work of Industrialism; Thierry Mugler Angel as an example of Surrealism; Issey Miyake L'eau d'Issey as Minimalism; Estée Lauder Pleasures as Photo Realism; Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue as Kinetic Sculpture, Prada Amber as Neo-romanticism, Hermès Hermessence Osmanthe Yunnan as a work of Luminism, and a perfume created by Daniela Andrier for Martin Margiela, Untitled, as an example of Post-brutalism. Why not?

Yes, indeed, one can apply language to anything in any way one likes. However, if one is simply making up the terms as one goes along, appropriating the well-developed discourse of an entirely disparate enterprise in a vain effort to come up with something new to say, then one will end up occupying a rather solipsistic space. Why? Because the art critics who are experts on the various schools of visual art have developed their language and criteria of critique in a particular context to which perfume simply does not belong, and they may or may not have any personal interest in and knowledge of perfume.

At the same time, from the other side, perfume enthusiasts—both perfumers and consumers—may in many cases be altogether ignorant of such movements in visual art. To expect them to become versed in the theory of another, rather erudite discipline before they're able to say anything meaningful about their direct experience of perfume seems dubious, to say the least.

The truth is that perfume lovers have come to their knowledge of perfume through their personal experience of perfume, to which the terms of visual art may or may not bear any relevance. If people are to have meaningful discussions about perfume with other people, they must together accept the terms of the debate rather than simply submitting to the proclamation of a single man that a completely foreign set of concepts and labels are the best way to discuss perfume.

The terms Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, Early American School, Industrialism, Surrealism, Minimalism, Photo Realism, Kinetic Sculpture, Industrialism, Neo-Romanticism, Luminism, and Post-Brutalism are all a part of a discourse which applies to a particular range of human activity. In order to succeed at hijacking this theoretical apparatus and applying it to perfume, one would have to simultaneously convince the art theorists and the perfumistas that they are all completely wrong: in the former case, for “failing to see” that, appearances notwithstanding, perfume is akin to the visual arts; in the latter case, for “failing” to use the prescribed language of visual art in talking about perfume.

I have noticed recently that many bloggers seem to be supportive of Chandler Burr's efforts, having apparently been hoodwinked into believing two manifest falsehoods. First, perfumistas continue to labor under the misconception that to deny that perfumery is an art is somehow to pay it a grave insult, when in fact nothing could be farther from the truth. To claim that perfume is a product of design is to appreciate the cultural context in which it arises and to acknowledge that, if not for business interests, we could have no knowledge of or access to perfume. To own that perfume is a product of design is to affirm what most everyone already does, that “Perfume must smell good,” just as as “Food must be edible.”

The constraints placed upon contracted perfumers are such that they are tasked with producing creations which satisfy the values of other people, not the creator him- or herself. If this enterprise can be said to be art, then it is a deeply coopted form of art. Why not simply acknowledge, then, that contracted perfumers are in the business of design? Just as the people who write advertising copy for companies are not, strictly speaking, literary writers, not all perfumers are olfactory artists—in fact, most of them are not. But perfumer is not a dirty word or a term of derogation.

To return to the basic confusion here, it simply does not follow from the fact that “Perfume is good” that “Perfume is art.” The value of perfume is an independent question from its status as a conceptual object. This is what the art critics and sophisticated perfumistas who scoff at Burr's ambitious and arguably befuddled initiative already know. Those bloggers who deride the art critics as somehow benighted in their failure to appreciate the artistic quality of perfume are in fact the ones who would seem to be confused.

If they actually knew what the terms Luminism, Photo Realism, and Kinetic Sculpture meant, in the deep way in which people who have dedicated their lives to learning about art have done, then they would recognize immediately that Burr's appropriation of this discourse constitutes no more and no less than a long series of category mistakes. Burr may have successfully linked himself with the “pro-perfume” camp, but one can be “pro-perfume” without being pro-Chandler Burr. The fates of the two are not linked, as much as he may wish for them to be.

My primary concern here is not with the economic implications of selecting a set of best-selling perfumes to essentially market in a new way by labeling them masterpieces. Suffice it here to make a simple economic observation: that every bottle of Light Blue or Pleasures purchased by a consumer in response to having learned that those perfumes have been exalted as masterpieces by someone who seems to be situated so as to competently make such claims, is one less bottle purchased from an independent house. Consumers have finite wallet shares.

The second falsehood seemingly embraced—whether wittingly or not—by anyone who supports Burr's initiative is that, up until now, both perfumistas and perfumers have somehow been confused in making use of the language devised by perfumers themselves in order to communicate with one another and their clients about perfume. In fact, Burr himself erroneously conflates ingredients and notes, as is illustrated by this excerpt from a New York Times piece (in which Burr is quoted) on "The Art of Scent" exhibit:

"I am completely opposed to this idiotic reductionism of works of olfactory art to their raw materials, which is as stupid as reducing a Frank Gehry building to the kind of metal, the kind of wood and the kind of glass that he used."

Burr may know a lot about the business of perfume (which, to be honest, makes me wonder how he of all people could believe that client-contracted perfumery is art), but simply to repeat over and over again that a perfume such as Diptyque Eau de Lierre is “an extraordinary work of photorealism,” and that perfume is art because it is a product of artifice, is not enough. Dryer sheets are a product of artifice. Are they then works of art, too?

Unfortunately for Burr, his greatest virtue, the ability to persuade people to believe in him enough to invest in him, is also his worst vice. It was Burr himself who proposed the very idea of the Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design, with none other than himself as its curator! If the package is pretty, that's all well and fine, but if this ambitious initiative is to survive, there must also be something inside. It's hard to imagine that many art critics are going to embrace with starry eyes Burr's makeshift apparatus and his slapping onto perfumes decreed by him to be masterpieces (and produced by his funders) of labels seemingly pulled out of a hat.

In order to succeed in this venture (and it is, let us be frank, a business venture), Burr's having persuaded perfume companies to donate to his cause will not alone suffice. He must also somehow wipe the theoretical slate clean of both the history of art and the history of perfume, and that, far more difficult task, would seem to be altogether beyond his means.

part 2