Public Space and Private Perfume Preferences: Is There a Problem?

I have often been surprised at the fervor with which some people denounce the use of perfume in certain spaces, most often the workplace, where the perfume naysayers appear generally speaking to hold sway. As a perfume lover, I am inclined to bristle at the effective olfactory tyranny of some in response to the complaints of a few, usually people who claim to suffer from severe allergies, and some of whom probably do. I doubt, frankly, that all of them do, just as I doubt that all of the people these days who request gluten-free substitutions in restaurants are in fact afflicted with Celiac disease (wheat gluten intolerance), as its incidence in the general population is rather low (~1%).

One reason why I doubt that very many people suffer from allergies bad enough to make even a whiff of someone's fragrance a cause for undue strife or major illness is that many parts of the world in which we live, and especially cities, are chock-full of scents. I often poke fun at New York City, in particular, but if such hypersensitive persons were truly so severely allergic, then it would be miraculous that they should be able to survive in most any city, in the midst of so many smells, many of which are quite a bit more offensive and obnoxious, if not noxious, than even Christian Dior Poison or Thierry Mugler Angel, to name but two of the more notoriously over-applied perfumes still in rotation among perfume wearers today. 

Despite my skepticism about and consternation at the anti-perfume backlash, however, I must confess that a couple of cases cause me to pause before dousing myself with loud perfume and proceeding to waltz out the door to a library or other public venue.

The Case of the Stinky Homeless Man

When I first moved to Boston, I used to attend free movie night at Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, conveniently located a few blocks from the Prudential Center and Copley Square and accessible by the T (our subway system). The films screened were usually classics, and so it was basically like going to a theater without paying but also being afforded the opportunity to see something which was actually worth watching. Overall, it was a nice way in which to indulge my passion for classic films without spending any money, which was especially good in my case as I had moved to this city without first finding a job and was living only on savings at that time.

The lure of attending free movies in a public space was considerably greater back then, before I had acquired a large flat screen television to forever obviate the need and squelch what motivation I once had for leaving my humble abode in order to see worthwhile films. I hardly ever go to watch movies in public anymore, and I suspect that I am not alone, although some theaters are managing to survive, even in a world where DVD releases succeed new movie premieres in some cases by a matter of only weeks. Since acquiring an HDTV, I find it very difficult to muster up the motivation to make my way to public movie screenings, although art film events such as the Boston French Film festival at the Museum of Fine Arts occasionally coax me away from the comfort of my couch.

One of the most unforgettable aspects of watching movies on Wednesday nights at Boston Public Library was the spectre of the local homeless men, one of whom in particular would often come to the movie screening and bring with him his weeks—months? years?—of accumulated stench. On the occasions where he sat within a few rows or seats from me, it was necessary to relocate to another part of the room because the smell was simply unbearable. One night I was so nauseated that I actually left without seeing the film.

The failure to bathe sufficiently or frequently enough is certainly not the province only of homeless people, but it is probably true that transients, having neglected hygiene in some cases literally for years, tend to be the worst olfactory offenders in this regard. They do not appear to recognize the type or extent of the scent which follows them around, leaving permanent memory traces in some people's minds, including mine. There are other varieties of unpleasant human-generated scent, but in thinking about public spaces and the question of perfume, I find myself drawn over and over again to the analogy which unwashed persons represent.

On the one hand, no one has the right to force someone else to bathe more frequently than he chooses to. On the other hand, it seems antisocial and rude to foist the scent of one's unwashed body upon other persons in public places. The case of the homeless person who reeks unbearably of filth, sweat, dirt, and general body odor all mingled together to produce a noxious “perfume” of sorts is especially interesting to me because of the apparent lack of intention on the part of the person to offend. Instead, stinkiness is a natural consequence of a lifestyle which may or may not have been chosen by the offender himself.

I imagine that most homeless people have not freely and willfully chosen that lifestyle, although a small proportion of them may have. For the most part, they are down on their luck, in some cases unable to land or keep a job because of psychological and emotional troubles. Having spent whatever resources they once had, they now lead a day-to-day, animal-like existence, living hand to mouth at the mercy of sympathetic passersby.

Perfumed people who stink because of their choice of fragrance or because they have overapplied it have definitely made a conscious decision to scent themselves, the consequence of which is to offend some of those in their environs. But I do not believe that very many such people intentionally overapply their fragrance in order to offend other people. Instead, they seem closer to the homeless man who, as a result of having not showered in weeks, months, or even years, verily stinks.

I was first made aware of the reality of olfactory fatigue on a day when a former colleague did not complain about but complimented me on my perfume, Marc Jacobs, which I was entirely unable to detect on myself so late in the day. In fact, when she asked me what I was wearing, I had to think back to what I had applied that morning in order to be able to answer the question!

In a recent comment on Perfumes of Geography: What's in a Place Name? here at the salon, Pitbull Friend observed that Serge Lutens Muscs Koublai Khan could be accurately renamed “Eau de Homeless Person”! Many people of course like and choose to wear this perfume, so Pitbull Friend's pointed barb underscores the general problem of divergent reception of perfumes, caused by our different tastes, backgrounds, and sensitivities, and is one reason why the question of perfume and public space seems to me to be quite complex.

What is interesting in the cases of the overperfumed and the homeless person (or the person who wears a detectable application of Muscs Koublai Khan in the presence of Pitbull Friend!) is the paramount importance of the subjective experience of the various parties in question. The overperfumed person does not believe that she stinks any more than does the homeless man. In each of these cases, the unwitting culprit, if you will, has become habituated, inured to his or her scent. The perfumed person has been wearing her perfume faithfully, let us say, for some time and has developed a tolerance for it, leading her to apply more and more so that she herself can smell her own perfume. The effect for others may be not at all unlike the homeless man who decides to sit close to you at the movie theater, making it impossible to concentrate on what is happening on the screen—or even to breath.

At the same time, and as Pitbull Friend suggested in christening Muscs Koublai Khan with her own colorful moniker, one perfumista's treasure is another's trash, and one person's heaven sent scent is another's hell-engendered olfactory torture implement. The question, then, for perfumistas becomes: when we wear perfume in public spaces in the presence of persons for whom perfume is a source of unpleasantness on a par with what we find to be highly offensive body odor, are we conducting ourselves in the manner of the transient who pays no heed to the negative effects of his scent upon the noses of others? Having consciously chosen to perfume ourselves, are we not, however, culpable in a way in which the homeless man cannot really be said to be, at least if it is true that he did not freely choose his current deplorable living conditions—city streets and alleys—and his resultant state of filth?

The Anti-smoking Revolution

Second-hand smoke offers a second tinted lens through which to view the perfume and public space issue. Not so long ago, smokers ruled the day. Nonsmokers had to grin and bear it in restaurants and bars because the smokers, having purchased their cigarettes and pipes and cigars, had simultaneously purchased the power to use them where they wished. The powerful tobacco lobby acted to promote and perpetuate the sale of tobacco far and wide, creating nicotine addicts in such abundance that they were able to bind together in solidarity to effectively repel the complaints of the nonsmokers.

The power of the smoker bloc shrouded the weakness of its individual members—they could not live without the stuff—but they were supported in a capitalist system where whoever has the gold makes the rules, and tobacco growers and cigarette manufacturers managed to suppress legislative efforts to curb tobacco use. Second-hand smoke was an annoyance which nonsmokers simply had to tolerate.

There has been a complete about-face on the second-hand smoke issue as more and more people have been made acutely aware in recent years of the serious health hazards of smoking, and the number of smokers continues to dwindle. The medical costs of dealing with the health problems caused directly by smoking eventually became more of a motive force than even the profits enjoyed by tobacco growers and cancer-stick manufacturers.

Massive marketing campaigns and legislation requiring the visible printing of health advisories on all ads and packaging for tobacco products eventually gave rise to an increased consciousness among people about the scientifically documented dangers of smoking. As a result, the number and proportion of smokers in the general population has plummeted in recent times. 

A big part of this downward trend in the percentage of smokers, and the concomitant turning of the tables to accommodate nonsmokers, leaving smokers out in the cold—figuratively but also literally, as anyone living in a city with frost on the ground in wintertime can attest—can be credited to the levying by governments of taxes on tobacco products so steep that it has become prohibitively difficult even to become a smoker, requiring as it does a significant amount of cash on hand to do so.

I actually marvel at the fact that any poor people are smoking at all these days, given the prohibitive cost of doing so, and I'm not sure what explains the persistence of this habit beyond the ongoing perception of a sort of “coolness” still associated with this practice in some sectors of society. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the very people who really can still afford to smoke tend to be well-educated and aware of the dangers of developing an addiction to nicotine. Taken together, these forces—the generally improved information disseminated to potential smokers and the prohibitive cost of purchasing tobacco-laden implements of premature self-inflicted death—persuades many would-have-been smokers (in earlier decades) never to begin.

Perfume haters who lobby for the prohibition of perfume in public space are concerned that many of the chemicals used in fragrances today have been demonstrated to cause health hazards on a par with exposure to second-hand smoke. Their argument is that they should not be in the position of endangering their own health because of someone else's willful decision to don a substance which will pervade the air of any space in which she travels.

I am sympathetic to the concern on the part of some people to avoid some of the substances included in perfumes today. Many of the chemicals do have pretty ugly health profiles, and I eschew them in my own personal perfume use. The question, then, is: should someone who avoids BHT, for example, be subjected to exposure to the substance simply in order to indulge another person's aesthetic caprice?

One possible solution to this problem, from the wearer's end, is to refuse to wear poisonous perfumes. This way one can prevent poisoning not only one's self but also others. The problem remains: which fragrances are the toxic soups, and which are innocuous liquids? Nearly anyone has horror stories of encounters with perfumes which induce vague feelings of malaise or even acute neurological distress.  But are those the poisonous perfumes? 

Once again, in considering personal perfume reception, it appears that one person's poison is another's panacea! I myself literally shudder at the thought of applying Estée Lauder Intuition or Isabella Rossellini Manifesto to my skin. I actually think that I would prefer to have my toe nails forcibly removed than wear Intuition again. Other people wear those perfumes comfortably and even reach for them in anticipation of the enhancement which it will bring to their day. A chacun son corps!

Some among the perfumes which I love, on the other hand, may well make some other people cringe. However much we may all love our own favorite perfumes, we are wired somewhat differently, and this manifests itself not only in our radically different evaluations of the quality of perfumes but also in our willingness to wear them. All of us quite naturally avoid the perfumes which induce in us undue strife, despite in some cases the praise of other people of the very same creations as great. It simply does not matter how much artistry has gone into a fragrance which makes us feel physically ill. That is the ultimate test of a bad perfume, it seems to me: its inability to be worn. While that may be an entirely subjective judgment, it is nonetheless authoritative—to us.

Ethics or Etiquette?

I am fortunate to have a large selection of perfumes ranging from intense mega-sillage elixirs which I myself cannot even don with the hope of getting anything done, to light, skin scent-like colognes whose presence I barely detect, if at all. I realize that some people who complain about perfume are simply complaining for the sake of complaining, because they want people to jump at their beck and call and to modify their habits at their behest.

Nonetheless, I approach the question of public space scent from the most charitable possible vista. I assume that there really are people whose ability to function well may be severely impeded by what to them is perfume-infused air no less polluted than a room full of second-hand smoke. For this reason, I reserve my intense, big projection perfumes for use at home, where I can be sure that no one will be bothered by the scent.

At the same time, when I encounter someone wearing the metaphorical equivalent to “Eau de Homeless Person,” I make a concerted effort to “put daylight” between us, to invoke a phrase unforgettably ascribed to U.S. President Barack Obama by presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. I operate under the assumption that such people do not know any better when they behave in socially unacceptable ways.

I do not conduct myself thus only in order to avoid conflict. No, I have an ulterior motive as well. By exercising discretion in my choice of perfume in public spaces, I avoid giving the perfume haters more grist for their mill. Similarly, while assuming that over-perfumed persons do not know what they are doing, I do not voice my disapproval because I refuse to give the perfume police and anti-perfume activists more evidence for their view that all perfume should be banned from public spaces. Nothing of the sort is true, of course, so strategically speaking, this approach makes the most sense to me.

In saying all of this, I should clarify, by way of conclusion, that I do not believe this to be an ethical issue at all. I do not believe that other people's even poisonous perfume is inflicted on those around them in concentrations sufficient to cause them harm. At the same time, as I have remarked before and will no doubt again, it seems quite clear to me that there is no natural right to perfume. Perfume is a luxury, pure and simple, and we are fortunate to be among the small percentage of humanity capable of enjoying this luxury. It is a privilege, not a right to perfume one's self, and no one is wronged by being deprived of something which was never his right in the first place.

Because we are among the tiny, incredibly privileged portion of humanity to enjoy the opportunity to indulge in the perfuming of ourselves, we should do so with discretion in public spaces, ever aware that it is our honor to do so. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard than the homeless man at the library and comport ourselves with civility among our fellow human beings, whatever that may require, and even when their perceptions differ radically from our own. 

The Bottle Controversy: A Philosophical Investigation

In thinking about what might be called “the bottle controversy,” that is, whether the vessel in which a perfume is housed should be an object of our attention and concern, I have become more and more convinced that bottles really do matter, and in more ways than I originally supposed. I have always been pleased by aesthetically beautiful bottles, and I occasionally retain a perfume for its bottle, even though I never (or no longer) wear the liquid inside. But the philosophical significance of bottles I now find even more striking than their aesthetic value as functional objects of design.

There are of course bottle collectors, who have made a hobby of the accumulation of perfume bottles in the way in which some people collect stamps or coins or figurines or baseball cards or... you name it: if an object appears in a variety of instantiations and can be possessed, there are collectors of it somewhere.

My interest in bottles is not that of a collector. I am interested in the philosophical importance of bottles. At the first level, I wonder what it could mean to say that the bottle and packaging of a perfume do not or should not matter. Why, from an aesthetic perspective, should a bottle matter any less than does anything else? has always been a persistent puzzle to my mind. To be honest, it's a version of a question which pops up regularly regarding virtually everything in my experience.

Believe it or not, whenever I see a notebook or even a block-colored cooler or trash can marred by an ugly label still affixed, though its purpose was only to bear an SKU so that the product could be sold, I ask myself why the owner did not peel it off, which would have left behind a smooth monochromatic surface worthy of regard. We don't wear price tags on our clothing, so why do some people leave such labels on objects which, too, will be visible to other people's eyes?

Despite my evident belief that everything in our experience has aesthetic potential, even what some consider to be the lowliest of objects, and despite my puzzlement over the sheer arbitrariness manifested by people in their selection of some but not others things as worthy of their aesthetic regard—I think here again of my well-off yuppie friends who have expensive artworks hanging on their walls but flatware which looks as though it was lifted from a local hospital cafeteria—it occurred to me recently that it would behoove us to dig a bit deeper. What I found was that beyond their manifest aesthetic value, perfume bottles possess a metaphysical and an epistemological significance as well. Indeed, even bottles which I do not find beautiful are nonetheless philosophically important to perfume.

The Philosophical Significance of Bottles I: Metaphysics

The Bottle [Body] as the Temple of the Soul

I have occasionally compared perfumes to persons, pointing out such similarities as mortality, natural progression or change over time, including aging, and how fickle our relations with them can be, in part because our perception of them is intrinsically perspectival. We cannot grasp a perfume in its totality any more than we can grasp a person in his or her entirety. What we have as experiences of them are snippets or screen shots, if you will. In reality, the precise properties which we attend to in a particular encounter may have much to do with arguably irrelevant or extrinsic factors. Were we distracted, perhaps multitasking? Did we not attend to the complexity of the story being told because there were other matters on our mind? Were we tired, exasperated or perhaps in a surly mood?

We also may experience radical changes in our affect toward perfumes as toward people. A perfume which we once loved, we may become unable to endure, whether because we have changed or it has. Some perfumes do not age well; others have been reformulated. Some of them don't change at all, but because we do, they no longer seem to be what we once thought that they were.

We may become more sophisticated in our perfume choices, or we may simply change our tastes, in some cases influenced by what happens to be on the market today, dictated by marketing gurus attempting to capture our wallet share. However slim our own investments in the perfume market may seem when regarded individually, the fact remains that we are all members of market niches. There are literally thousands of others like you, my fragrant friends, at least when it comes to perfume-shopping behavior.

As a result of all of these factors, our relationships with perfumes, just as our relationships with other people, may be shaped and even to some extent determined by arbitrary circumstances of chance. At the most fundamental and obvious level, we cannot develop a relationship with either a person or a perfume whom we've never met!

It dawned on me recently that if a perfume is analogous in so many ways to a person—specifically, what is often thought to be the essence of a person, his or her soul—then this would seem to imply that the bottle is analogous to the physical body of a person. In other words, the bottle, like the body, is the temple of the soul.

Now, not everyone buys this reasoning, and some thinkers woefully neglect their physical well-being, eschewing exercise, eating poorly, and in some cases indulging excessively in toxic substances such as alcohol and other drugs, under the arguably false assumption that they are actually benefiting from this self-inflicted bodily abuse. While a few outlier thinkers and artists may flourish creatively as their bodies self-destruct, generally speaking, the health of the body has predictable effects upon the health of the mind or soul. If poisons are coursing through one's body, then the brain, too, is bound to be affected in one way or another, often for the worse.

One possible basis for the folk wisdom that “the body is the temple of the soul” can be found in the thought of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher who maintained that human beings are rational animals. Yes, we have minds or souls, but we also are connected in a fundamental way to the earth and the rest of nature as embodied souls.

There is no way for a person to live in this world without his or her body, and there is no way for a perfume to exist without being somehow housed in a physical object which will prevent it for a finite amount of time from evaporating. Eventually, every last drop of any perfume will disappear, no matter how carefully it is stored, and this is precisely what I mean when I say, metaphorically, that perfumes are every bit as mortal as persons are. The question becomes: given that our souls must inhabit bodies, should we not take care of the vessels in which we travel, and should we not care about the image which they convey to others?

Curmudgeons will of course reply “No.” They don't give a damn what other people think of their appearance, and some may even revel in their grunge attire and generally slovenly demeanor. In conducting themselves thus, such people sell themselves short, it seems to me, because while they may be rejecting the values of mainstream society, they do so to their own detriment. One reaction to what appears to be the undeniable fact that people really do care how we carry ourselves and how we generally look is to deny that those people's opinions matter.

Another reaction is to cultivate and provoke precisely the sort of disapproval which most people work hard to avoid, endeavoring as they do to conform or to “fit in,” so as not to appear abnormal or deviant. This sort of reaction might be termed the “rebellious teenager” response. People who during adolescence get mohawks and conspicuous tattoos and body piercings precisely in order to mortify their parents, unwittingly find themselves right back with the others, the herd, so to speak, conforming as they do in their nonconformity to the behavior of other members of what is in effect a subculture of "rebels". When the deviant appearance cultivated matches a familiar profile (Sid and Nancy, anyone?), then it all starts to look like a uniform and undermines the initial basis of what once was a creative revolt. Defining one's self in response entirely and only as a reaction to other people is the essence of what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche termed slave morality.

Another, more sophisticated, approach to this question can be found, again, in the thought of Aristotle. The philosophical question for someone convinced of the equal importance of the mind or soul and the body is simply this: if we comprise both a body and a soul, why should we care only about the latter? The Christian response is of course that the soul is immortal, which the body is not. Therefore, the reasoning goes, because the soul exists infinitely, it is infinitely more important than the body.

Is there—or could there be—any compelling evidence for that sort of super-religious view, which pretty much negates the value of terrestrial existence? Many people throughout history have certainly believed in the immortality of the soul, which explains, among other things, the readiness of Christians such as Augustine and Aquinas—among many others—to defend wars whose most obvious and immediate outcomes are to bring some human beings' lives to a premature close. 

In reality, having only the evidence of the existence of our own mind and our own body, as we exist here on earth, it seems to me (and Aristotle) that there is no clear basis for favoring the mind over the body. The fact is that we are embodied beings. 

The question, again, quite naturally arises: are our bodies any less a part of us than our minds?

In the case of perfume, both the bottle and the liquid inside are eventually going to disappear or be discarded, but until then, they are bound together in just the way that we are housed in our bodies. The bottle naysayers take themselves to be exalting perfume, but they do so through a perverse denial of the aesthetic potential of the vessels themselves.

Many perfume houses clothe their perfumes in attire befitting of the glory and nobility of the elixirs which their resident or contracted perfumers have painstakingly created. Others appear to pour their perfumes into n'importe quoi, as though the user could somehow access the perfume without interacting with the bottle. No, I'm afraid that just as we cannot have direct physical contact with a person in reality except through his or her body, we cannot apply perfume without interacting with its bottle.

In fact, this is even more graphic in the case of perfume than in that of human beings. Modern technologies such as the telephone and the internet have made it possible for us to develop meaningful relationships with persons whom we have never encountered physically. 

Not so with perfume. In order to experience a perfume, you must apply it to your skin, which necessarily involves removing it from a physical object, its bottle or some sort of vial. The naysayers proclaim that we need to strip perfume of its irrelevant packaging and experience it as an art object in itself. Let us now examine a bit more closely the prospect of doing such a thing.

The Philosophical Significance of Bottles II: Epistemology

The Bottle as a Metaphor for Context

I find the application of the Aristotelian concept of the person to the case of perfume to be very helpful in understanding the importance of bottles. However, it is possible to ascend to an even higher, metalevel in thinking about bottles as well. It seems to me that bottles ultimately reveal themselves to have not just metaphysical but also epistemological significance.

Epistemology, for those who were too busy in college learning trades to be able bother with electives such as Philosophy 101, is the study of knowledge. What do we know? What are we justified in believing? How do we know what we know, if we know anything at all? These questions are at the heart of epistemology.

When perfumistas today say that they don't care about the packaging, they mean to be expressing a sophisticated view about the importance of taking the perfume on its own terms, as a thing in itself. This all sounds very lofty and nice, but the reality, my fragrant friends, is that no perfume exists in a vacuum. Perfumes arise always and only in social and economic contexts. Perfumes cannot be fully abstracted from this context. Why? Because even the very act of abstraction is culturally prefigured by an antecedent desire to elevate perfume to the status of one of the beaux arts.

Without a context, a liquid is just a liquid. It becomes christened as a perfume only as a result of having been created by a perfumer—whether professional or amateur—and then appreciated in a particular context. If a perfume is to be recognized as such, it must be placed into a larger cultural apparatus, a framework whereby other people are afforded the opportunity to experience it as well. All of this is done through the reproduction of perfumes according to recipes or formulas specified by perfumers. The mixing together of the various components is typically carried out by chemists or technicians conversant with all of the different ingredients and aware of the proper procedure to be followed in order to faithfully reproduce the original perfume.

Because a perfume cannot even in principle be shared without being placed into this apparatus, situated within this complex system—what is no more and no less than the business of perfumery—this implies that bottle-free perfume is a sort of intellectual fancy with no correlate in reality.

The fact is that we experience perfumes not in spite but only because of the marketing which is carried out in order to sell the product to consumers. This is true whether the perfume is being purveyed by a large megacorporate conglomerate such as Procter & Gamble, LVMH, Estée Lauder, et al., or by a small independent house such as those of perfumers Andy Tauer and Ineke Rühland or even less well-known perfumers such as John Pegg of Kerosene or Josh Lobb of Slumberhouse.

All perfumes known to us are known to us only because their creators, whether contracted or self-employed, have agreed to play the perfume business game. If they had been content to mix private bespoke perfumes for themselves and their families, then we would never have heard of them and would never have had the pleasure of experiencing their perfumes.

Now, the putative purists will reply, the fact that perfumes come in bottles and packaging and are marketed using a variety of gimmicks and techniques does not mean that there is not an olfactory object there to be appreciated as a thing in itself. We need to clear away all of the irrelevant matter and focus on the perfume, not its packaging—or so the self-styled sophisticate's reasoning goes.

This is all well and fine as an abstract argument, but as a project, it is entirely quixotic, at best. It is not just that our access to perfume requires that it be somehow stored and conveyed to us. No, the problem is much deeper than that, inhering not in fortuitous facts about the world, but in our very capacity to understand anything at all.

The truth is that our entire understanding of perfume derives from the business apparatus in which it is situated. Why do we talk about notes? Why do we talk about development trajectories, longevity, and sillage? Because they are created concepts which we only know about because they have been used extensively for marketing purposes. Why do we discuss perfumes in the terms in which we do? This one is a floral aldehyde, that one a chypre; both are very different from citrus colognes and gourmand perfumes.

The truth, my fellow fragrant travelers, is that we could have no conversation about perfume were we not to avail ourselves of the very language developed in order to sell perfume. What's more, without our memories of other perfumes, presented to us in rich contexts, of which their bottle is a metaphor, we could not identify or say anything whatsoever about a perfume. It would only be a smell.

Some may perhaps suggest that we return to the proverbial state of nature with regard to perfume. My reply:  Why would we want to do that? As a matter of fact, it's rather easy to determine what the untutored sniffer thinks of perfume. Ask any ignorant person whom you encounter on the street. Is that the sort of fresh, guileless naïveté which we should be striving for? In fact, there are plenty of such people opining about perfume all over the place. Their sincere proclamation that this or that new celebrity launch is a breathtaking masterpiece is a reflection, it seems, of their limited perspective on perfume, grounded in a lack of experience of anything but creations made in that mold.

But all of us have the very same problem of skewed perspective, it seems to me. There is no way for us intellectually to process perfume outside of the context in which it has arisen and is sustained in the culture in which we live. We come to any perfume, whether it is in a bottle or an unmarked vial or a room of scent devoid of visual cues so that we'll not be distracted from “the scent itself”, with a robust set of beliefs and theory. We cannot abstract perfume from marketing contexts because our understanding of perfumes derives primarily from our own memories of perfumes experienced in the past, all of which were anchored in that very same apparatus. This implies that in order to smell a perfume in and of itself, we would need somehow to suppress all of our memories of all of our prior experiences.

If we were to succeed in doing that, we would no longer possess the capacity to understand what we encountered. In the paraphrased and translated words of the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant:

Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.

Perfume bottles are, I would like to suggest, a metaphor for the epistemological apparatus which we must bring to any object in order to be able to apprehend it. Without all of our prior beliefs and memories, we would not be able to make any sense whatsoever out of a perfume. Removing it from its natural habitat, the bottle in which it is housed, therefore seems like a vain and arbitrary abstraction. Why should such a feat of isolation yield a more veridical experience than the use of a perfume directly from a bottle, which is precisely the manner in which we came to love perfume in the first place?

It's not just that context matters aesthetically—which it does, as anyone who enjoys fine cuisine will readily aver. Why, after all, was silverware ever invented when we have hands which are perfectly adequate to the task of feeding ourselves? The answer, of course, is that beautiful place settings enhance delectable food. The same, therefore, seems to be true in the case of perfume. Beautiful bottles are not distractions but enhancers of beautiful perfumes.

“You can't judge a book by its cover!” some will reply. And it is certainly true that if the text inside is ugly or incoherent, then even the most aesthetically exquisite book cover will not be able to hide this regrettable fact. However, sometimes gorgeously produced books do reflect the value of the text inside. Again, as in the case of collectors of empty perfume bottles, there are book collectors who may or may not actually read the books of which they amass large libraries. They are truly interested in the presentation of what others have claimed to be great works and may or may not have the time or inclination to read all or even any of them.

Some perfume lovers appear to be troubled by the use of bottles to seduce consumers into buying perfumes. In reality, however, if most perfumes are purchased scent unsniffed—as I presume that they are—then marketers are acting rationally in luring potential buyers through the use of bottles produced by designers every bit as talented as the perfumers who created the liquids inside. In some cases, a house or corporate conglomerate may become jaded, fill beautiful bottles with chemical soup, invest far more time, money, and energy in the bottle, marketing, and packaging than on the liquid inside. That was, of course, the take-away lesson of “Behind the Spritz,” the Daily Finance article which revealed that 98% of the purchase price of a bottle of mainstream celebrity brand perfume has nothing whatsoever to do with the perfume itself!

These facts are a reflections of the nature of business and in part the nature of the sorts of human beings who enter into business ventures. They may or may not share our aesthetic values or our interest in what we take to be a worthy object of our affection, in this case, perfume. They may regard perfume as an exalted toiletry which just happens to have a fantastic mark-up potential. (It appears that only cosmetics have a higher profit margin.)

Business people dressed up in artists' clothes may of course seize the opportunity to establish a niche perfumery house having discovered that perfume lovers are willing to spend $100, $200, even $800 for a bottle of perfume! The people who are willing to pay so much money for what hoi polloi regard as a toiletry along the lines of mouthwash and deodorant are investing in luxury products, which generally command huge amounts of money relative to the production costs. The price in fact becomes a part of the aura and fascination.

Many of the most expensive perfumes come in gorgeous packaging. Why? Because the people who consume them are enjoying them as luxury items in the way in which they might enjoy a watch which costs thousands of times more than a Timex but which serves the very same function: to tell time. That is the reply of people who scoff at Rolex timepieces. They prefer to pocket the thousands of dollars in change which they will save by wearing an inexpensive watch because the real reason why they care about watches is only as a source of information. I suspect that with the panoply of omnifunction handheld phone gadgets now in near ubiquity, the watch will soon become purely a piece of jewelry, if that has not happened already...

People who wear perfume as body spray are simply scenting themselves. They are not interested in spending hundreds of dollars for a bottle of perfume, because they have an entirely different attitude toward what they take to be its function. The truth is that perfume is dispensable. Unlike food and water, human beings can live without perfume. That we come to appreciate it at all is a result of the happy fact that some people in the business world, as crass and mercenary as they may sometimes be, have decided that marketing and selling perfumes is a worthwhile venture. 

We may idolize our favorite perfumers, but unless they are also business people or find ways to work with business people, then we can have no access to their creations. Unless they team up with persons interested in profiting from perfume through presenting it to consumers in enticing ways, then we will never have any knowledge of what they do.

Perfume exists in a social and cultural context, not a vacuum. To abstract it from this context would be to evacuate it of all meaning. Can we smell Chanel no 5 as a thing in itself? No, my fragrant friends, we cannot. Our consciousness has been literally flooded by images of beautiful women presumably wearing Chanel no 5. Therefore, our understanding of this iconic perfume derives not only from the smell of the liquid itself, which some maintain is divine, but much more importantly from nearly a century of incessant, relentless marketing campaigns which have created a narrative through which the perfume is understood by us. The very words 'Chanel no 5' evoke an avalanche of visual images and memories, even among people who have no idea what the perfume itself smells like!

The latest chapter of this lengthy, complex narrative is attempting to broaden the base of this perfume's lovers beyond the tuxedo and mink stole crowd to include, well, people who relate to or are attracted by Brad Pitt, whose current incarnation is housed in faded denims, long stringy hair, and a goatee. As one astute Fragrantican aptly wrote (under the moniker "100mlEDT"): "Brad looks like he needs a dollar, a shave, and a shower."

If the campaign succeeds, then Chanel no 5 may still be around a century from now. If not, at some point in time, somewhere down the line, people will decide that the perfume beloved by so many for so long smells dated and inappropriate: a relic from perfume's past. More likely, Chanel will simply recycle its formerly successful ads. A woman is a woman after all...

Whatever may eventually happen to Chanel no 5, no one can truthfully say that they are capable of abstracting it from its rich context and making objective judgments about its value as a perfume in and of itself, or so it seems to me. Without bottles and ad campaigns, perfumes are just smells.

Wine Fraud and Perfume Reformulation: A Distinction without a Difference?

Just when I think that I've finally laid my Reflections on Reformulation to rest once and for all, along comes Rudy Kurniawan to rehydrate all of the same puzzles and concerns once again.

Mr. Kurniawan first caught my eye in a recent New York Times article, in which he was exposed to public shame for I believe the very first time. The guy is a con artist and a shyster who fooled lots of people who thought that they knew a lot about wine. Some among his associates did not even believe the story when the fraud first came to light. Kurniawan had been using his home as a “laboratory” for the production of facsimiles of exorbitantly priced wines:

The photos showed reams of printed labels for some of the most expensive wines in the world, like Château Pétrus, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Château Lafleur, as well as corks, foils, rubber stamps with vintage dates and bottles that prosecutors said were being prepared as counterfeits.

Upon seeing the photographs, Kurniawan's friend and associate Paul Wasserman, who was in denial about the charges, finally lamented:

Once you see those pictures, you’re kind of like, O.K., game over...Today, I feel really stupid. Back then, there were always enough alternative narratives that were really plausible.

Yes, the radical underdetermination of theory by data strikes once again. This poignant little tale calls to mind the revelation to Holly Martins of his friend Harry Lime's crimes in Carol Reed's classic 1949 film, The Third Man. In that case, too, not until photographic evidence was produced that Lime had been conducting a racket involving penicillin in post-war Austria was his friend able to accept the regrettable truth.


Penicillin is not perfume, so why in the world did the case of Rudy Kurniawan make me think about perfume reformulation all over again? Because it is difficult, on its face, to understand how the brash, brazen reformulation of a once-classic perfume to a mere shadow, a muzak version, or a caricature of its former self does not, too, constitute an instance of fraud. Certainly the consumer seems to be made into a laughing stock in both cases.

Having recently re-read some of my reviews of reformulated versions of a few once-classic perfumes, Coty Muguet des Bois and Eméraude, Nina Ricca L'Air du Temps, and Worth Je Reviens, I realized that the disappointment I felt that these imposters were being sold under the same names as the perfumes which they had once been, may mask a deeper sentiment: righteous anger that I and so many other consumers have been robbed through a sinister form of false advertising.

We are told that these are great perfumes because they once were. People continue to buy these perfumes because they believe what they are told. Here is an example of how the ruse works. According to one online emporium, L'Air du Temps, now a reformulated disaster, is nonetheless and still:

an icon fragrance that upholds eternal values: peace, love, freedom. A timeless and refined fragrance with a strong personality.

Perfumistas have of course determined that the latest reformulations of all of these perfumes are something of a bad joke. So my question stands: Does this not constitute a case of fraud every bit as scandalous as Rudy Kurniawan's shameless heist in bottling cheap wine and fobbing it off for masterpieces at mindboggling prices?

One reason why perfume comes naturally to mind in thinking about wine is that both are products consumed by many people, and both come in a wide range of genres and at many different price levels. Most people who drink wine have never and will never spend $1,000 or even $100 on a single bottle of wine. Of course, in a world where many people have difficulty even locating potable water, it can hardly be said to be a violation of anyone's rights that the upper echelons of wine should be out of most people's financial reach.

Perhaps there is a sort of poetic justice in the fleecing of people who are able to spend so much money on wine in the first place. Perhaps that is precisely what Rudy Kurniawan thought as he amassed millions of dollars hob-nobbing with the rich and powerful while he secretly exposed—to no one but himself—that they, too, were really poseurs, at least when it came to wine.

Wine is a fascinating case to my mind because the range of prices is so much more vast than the range of prices for perfumes. This is why whenever I hear someone complaining about the price of perfume, I am able immediately to infer that he or she is not a wine connoisseur. It's almost laughable how inexpensive even the most costly perfume is next to the upper echelons of the sort of wine in which connoisseurs indulge. Do you really think that a $200 bottle of perfume which you may be able to wear one hundred times is expensive, when you can easily spend that much money on a single bottle of upper-mid-range wine to be consumed over the course of one meal? QED.

I have often puzzled over the disparity in pricing of all other luxury goods, as compared to perfume, and my best guess is that we are aided enormously by market-generated price control when it comes to perfume, because most people do appear to use it as a toiletry. When ordinary people purchase a perfume, it seems in their mind to be closer to a deodorant or a tube of toothpaste or a moisturizer than it does to a Rolex watch or a yacht.

We perfumistas may then benefit from the mass-market creation of a widely accepted notion of what constitutes a “normal” price for a perfume. Comparing a bottle which costs $20 to $200, then, it may seem “outrageous” that if the liquids are phenomenologically similar in quality, that one of them should cost ten times more than the other.

This is, of course, the basis of the complaints which people make about relatively expensive lines such as Amouage, Bond no 9, Creed, Boadicea the Victorious, and the über-expensive lines such as Clive Christian, and Xerjoff. I understand these complaints. If you can buy essentially the same perfume for $20 that you are being asked to pay $300 for, then it just seems plain stupid to do so. Just because you have some money does not mean that you want to throw it away.

At the same time, I don't think that there is anything wrong with companies charging whatever they wish for their perfumes. If a consumer does not think that a perfume is worth the price, then he will not buy it. End of story. There is no question of morality in these scenarios, it seems to me.

Reformulation, in contrast, raises some of the same vexing moral questions brought to the fore so colorfully by the case of Rudy Kurniawan. To see this, we need to reflect upon what exactly is supposed to be wrong with what this young man, age 36 at the time of his apprehension, did.

What's Wrong with Wine Fraud?

Some Known Knowns 

Duplicity

Wine: Rudy Kurniawan lied about the wines he sold at auctions to wealthy wine collectors. They were not what he claimed them to be.

Perfume: Do not houses in effect lie when they claim that a perfume is what the name suggests it to be, when in fact the bottles are filled with something entirely different?

Intention

Wine: Rudy Kurniawan intended to make a lot of money (and he did!) by bottling less-expensive wines and selling them at the prices which the rare wines which he claimed them to be command in today's market.

Perfume: Houses obviously reformulate perfumes such as Coty Muguet des Bois and Eméraude to drastically slash their production costs, after which they are sold in large volumes at low prices. The intention is to maximize profit. Rather than targeting a smaller niche with perfumes produced in smaller volumes at higher cost and sold to discriminating clientele, such drugstore reformulated classics are primarily sold to people who do not know very much about perfume.

Perfumistas, who are much better informed than the average consumer of perfume, are aware of the fact that such perfumes have been reformulated and bear very little resemblance to the perfumes which made the names famous in the first place. But the companies do not lie and deny that the perfumes have been reformulated. So where does the responsibility lie when someone who re-purchases what she thought was her beloved perfume and discovers that it has radically changed for the worse? Am I, not Guerlain, at fault in the case of My Ugly Divorce From Mitsouko?

Clearly there is at least one well-known distinction between the case of wine fraud and that of perfume reformulation. The former is illegal; the latter is not. Indeed, many houses now claim that it precisely in order to conform with restrictions imposed by the IFRA (International Fragrance Association) that they have been compelled to reformulate their perfumes. The houses, then, may sound like innocent victims in all of this. Is our anger that they should have reformulated our once-favorite perfumes misdirected?

My distinct impression is that most reformulations have not been undertaken in order to conform with the new IFRA standards. Certainly many have not, including all of those reformulations which were carried out before the IFRA issued its paternalistic directives intended, apparently, to aid people with allergies, though anyone who knows anyone with allergies is aware that they are basically the last people on the planet to perfume themselves.

So far we have not made much progress. After all, the legal distinction may simply mask a moral equivalence. For many centuries, slavery was legal. It did not become immoral when it was outlawed. Rather, it is because people recognized the immorality of slavery that it was finally outlawed.

Perhaps, then, perfume reformulation should be illegal, too, and it has simply taken longer for legislation to be developed regarding perfume than wine because many more people drink alcohol than use perfume. In fact, I think that there is a real distinction between the two cases, despite the fact that perfume reformulation may elicit righteous anger as well, whenever an unwitting consumer purchases a perfume under the assumption that it is what it was before.

What makes a Wine the Wine that it is?

To understand the difference between wine fraud and perfume reformulation, it may be helpful to think about the ontological differences between the two cases. Wines come in many different types: Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir, etc., etc. Perfumes, too, come in many different types: floral aldehyde, citrus cologne, leather chypre, aromatic fougère, floriental, fruity floral, aquatic, etc., etc.

Wine and perfume bear similarities to one another above all in this regard: the products of a particular vineyard are unique to it, just as the products of a particular perfume house are unique to it. Just as the wines which were being faked by Kurniawan were not actually produced by the vineyards he claimed, in the case of perfume fakes, some other agents are conducting themselves in the manner in which the wine shyster did. They buy bottles and labels and liquids and put the whole production together so as to trick consumers (usually on e-bay, these days) into buying their pseudo-Chanels, pseudo-Creeds, etc.

In the case of perfume reformulation, in contrast, the sole act of deception is the use of the name of a perfume with a new formula when it used to be the name of a perfume with the former (classic) formula.

The recent and bizarre case of Christian Dior's renaming of Miss Dior and Miss Dior Chérie offers a telling lesson for our investigations. 

Dior has relabeled as Miss Dior L'originale what used to be known as Miss Dior. At the same time, the perfume formerly known as Miss Dior Chérie has been renamed Miss Dior. This absurdly incoherent managerial decision on the part of some nincompoop at Dior has received a lot of attention and negative criticism from perfumistas.

However, I believe that for the first time in perfume history, LVMH has actually done something positive (albeit unwittingly...) for the world of perfume. What they have done is to illustrate the autocratic prerogative of houses to name whatever they produce whatever they wish to call it. By this strange renaming of their perfumes, Dior has made it abundantly clear and virtually unforgettable to us perfumistas that the perfume houses are capable, in their own narrowly circumscribed domain, of making it the case that
2 + 2 = 5!

Houses have this god-like prerogative because they alone are privy to the recipes of their perfumes. If they want to change those recipes, they are free to do so, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it. It is not clear that it is even in principle possible to do anything about it, because the secret ingredient of every perfume is “parfum”, which contains such small amounts of the key (identity-making) components that the companies are not required to list them individually, because no one who produces anything is required to list such tiny quantities on the labels of their products.

What is interesting about the case of wine production is that there is no real analogue to perfume reformulation because the names of wines are intrinsically tied up with the years of their production. The quality of a particular lot of wine is essentially determined by its ingredients: how they have been handled and produced, including the nature of the grapes of the particular harvest used. Yes, winemakers do things to their wines to produce certain effects, but the basic ingredients themselves change from year to year.

The house of Demeter produced in 2009 a series of Vintage Natural perfumes (Geranium, Lavender, Mimosa, Patchouli, and Rose) which embrace and extol this very feature of wine, making a virtue of the uniqueness imparted to any perfume by the particular “harvest” from which its natural components derive.

There is no possibility that these perfumes will ever be reproduced by Demeter, because the names of the perfumes contain the year in which they were produced. It would be impossible to re-produce the 2009 Vintage Natural perfumes in 2012, because the components would not derive from 2009 but from 2012.

By producing these perfumes, Demeter underscored the similarities between wine and perfume. In reality, what Demeter says about its 2009 Vintage Natural perfumes should apply to every natural perfume, though many houses continue to produce what they claim to be the same perfume under the same name, admitting in some cases that there will be slight variations from batch to batch.

In the case of reformulations of perfume labeled in the same way but the formulas of which have been intentionally changed, it seems that there is a trick being played upon the consumer. While it may be that many of us perfumistas are aware of reformulations, it seems quite clear that ordinary consumers often are not. Thus many people continue dutifully to buy readily and cheaply available drugstore Guerlain Shalimar under the assumption that it is indeed a great perfume.

This is the sense in which I believe that perfume reformulation can approach the sort of moral fraud committed by shysters such as Rudy Kurniawan. Still, houses are free to call whatever they produce whatever they like, as Christian Dior so brashly and shamelessly demonstrated in renaming Miss Dior Chérie as Miss Dior and Miss Dior as Miss Dior L'Originale. At the same time, Dior has been, it seems, regularly reformulating all of its perfumes, so in the end, all bets are off when you buy what you hope to be a second or third bottle of a perfume which you once loved, and their renaming of these perfumes serves as a handy reminder of all of this.

The world of wine and the world of perfume are distinct in at least this way: reformulation is not possible in the former as it is in the latter case. To call a wine produced in 2012 in Rudy Kurniawan's home laboratory a 1985 Château Pétrus Pomerol—which, by the way, retails as of today at 4pm EST for $2,412.94—is simply and utterly a lie.

Interestingly enough, Kurniawan was tripped up through a series of unbelievably amateurish errors, including this one, reported by Decanter.com:

The case against Rudy Kurniawan is that in 2008 he consigned at auction some 84 bottles purporting to be from Domaine Ponsot in Burgundy, including one from 1929, which was impossible as the estate did not begin bottling until 1934.

Let's see, the money used to buy a bottle of 1985 Château Pétrus Pomerol could be used instead to purchase ten bottles of niche perfume. Is the price of perfume too high? I think not. Do you get what you pay for? Yes, indeed. But the rules for perfume admit the form of marketing deception known as “reformulation,” for whatever reasons a house may deem fit, and this is why it is important to be ever vigilant in buying famous-name perfumes.

We should first determine whether our beloved perfume has been reformulated, and if it has, we should exercise caution by testing before we re-buy. If it turns out to be yet another case of a drastic and crass reformulation, where a once-great perfume has been reduced to something akin to paint thinner, then it is time for us to move on.

Fortunately—or not—new perfumes are being launched faster than breeding rabbits, which of course raises the problem of locating the new classics, if there be any such things.... As for me, I console myself with the existence of a few good bottles of discontinued perfumes, the likes of Guerlain Mahora and Kenzo L'Eléphant Jungle, which have thus been spared the chemist-accountant scalpels now carrying out their carnage at most of the big houses.

In conclusion, perfume reformulation is not akin to wine fraud; it's a different sort of beast.

Caveat Emptor!!!!!