FRAGRANCE IS FUNCTIONAL: How I learned to stop worrying about art and enjoy my perfume for what it is

Summertime presents a propitious opportunity to reflect upon the nature of perfume. Why? Because it's damned hot outside—at least here in Boston—and a good cologne can vastly improve one's oppressive and muggy and sweaty and otherwise unpleasant afternoon. How does cologne work its mood-elevating magic?

First off, it smells good. From bright citrus to clean musk to grassy green to violet leaf and lightly spiced tea, colognes manage to cover the gamut of scents found in the larger olfactory sphere spanning all perfumes, but the lower percentage of key ingredients makes cologne perfect for the summer months.

Yes, cologne cools and refreshes the body, particularly when applied as a splash, which is possible because of the lower concentrations of scent-making ingredients. More of the liquid which hits the skin is alcohol and water, proving yet again that hydration is good. With a few spritzes or a gentle splash, the spirit is immediately renewed as the air spinning off that ceiling fan suddenly seems twenty degrees cooler than it did. The action of the fan and the cologne are collaborating in a small piece of deceit: neither changes the temperature of the ambient air in the room, but together they fool the body into feeling much cooler than it was before.

My favorite colognes are those featuring a large percentage—preferably 100%—of natural ingredients. That's because in extreme weather conditions newfangled chemical soups sometimes morph in unexpected ways, just as I imagine perfumes do more generally when exposed to heat and light. Because the temperature is elevated even while the cologne is worn, I have found that the more natural it is, the better it tends to hold together and consistently smell nice. 

Cologne used in this way is obviously functional fragrance. Is it anything else? To be honest, my unedited response to this question is: Who cares? Is not fulfilling one important function enough to justify the existence of cologne? Why must it also be something else? Who says that it must be, and why?

I began thinking about this question recently while soaking in a scented tub and listening to one of Beethoven's string quartets. It suddenly dawned on me how much more complex and interesting even a single passage from a work of classical music is than even the most complicated of perfumes. Sure some of them (albeit fewer and fewer these days...) unfurl in interesting ways, transforming from one to another scent over the course of a wear.

In the most dynamic of cases, the perfume may undulate as its component scents wax and wane, leading one's nose to take note of different features of the composition at different moments in time and permitting a form of olfactory reflection and refraction to take place. But even in those rare cases of the most complex of perfumes, probably the closest comparison to complexity in music would be something along the lines of a four-chord pop song.

Perfume simply cannot, even in principle, scale the heights achieved by music, first, because it is so much simpler and, second, because our perception of it is so very subjective. I admit that I am pianist, trained in classical repertoire, and so my apparent disparagement or belittling of perfume may seem unfair to someone who, instead, has spent his life creating new combinations of scents. There may be some truth to that criticism, but I still believe that a finished perfume is considerably less interesting than any sonata or ballade, or prélude or mazurka or étude—or even two-part invention by J.S. Bach. I truly believe that even the profoundest of perfumes is nowhere near as interesting as even the simplest piece of music which I've ever played or heard.

Perfume is there to be enjoyed, a number of scents combined together in a small volume of space and usually not found together in exactly that way in nature. (Exceptions to the rule include realistic soliflores.) If masterfully composed, the combination of these scents will play out over time, but there is nothing even approaching tonal counterpoint to be found in a bottle of perfume. Even worse, owing to a variety of features peculiar to perfume perception in human beings, we cannot even seem to agree what we are talking about!

In approaching music, we have something to point to. There are key signatures and tempos and voices and refrains and codas. These are all written right there into the score, so no one can deny their presence. We can have a conversation about all of those aspects of music in the way in which we cannot so much when it comes to perfume because people do not even agree about what they smell, and its significance appears clearly to be determined by their idiosyncratic past history, values, and beliefs.

Judging by the reviews I've seen online, many people are affected by the note pyramids offered up by the house, even though it seems obvious that they are often a part of marketing the perfume and may or may not have any objective validity. My distinct impression is that many reviewers feel that they must perceive the official notes, and this may lead them to offer a narrative about the perfume which features those notes, even in those cases—such as highly abstract designer fragrances—where nothing even approaching the essences of the named flowers is present. What is in the bottle does matter, but it is mediated through an amalgamation of entirely subjective associations—and market-induced expectations. People are influenced to different degrees by marketing, and since no one else has lived our own life or walked in our shoes, no one else will perceive a perfume in exactly the same way that we do. Yes, you can tell a story about a perfume, but 99% of it derives from inside your head.

One might retort that the same can be said about music, which is just as subjectively processed, and it is true that people have different tastes in music and different levels of sophistication when it comes to understanding music theoretically. But two people who have been trained classically—say, two pianists—can talk about the objective features of a sonata written into the score. In stark contrast, two equally knowledgeable perfumistas may or may not agree about what they smell or whether it is any good.

While sitting in my tub listening to beautiful music and enjoying a pleasant scent wafting off the water, it occurred to me that the value of perfume has absolutely nothing to do with whether it will ever be exalted as one of the beaux arts by Western culture. It simply does not matter, at the end of the day, because the only reason why I really care about perfume is because I use it. My enjoyment of perfume is not different in kind from my enjoyment of the scent wafting off the bath water, even though the two scents may have been produced in entirely different ways.

Let me repeat the above confession: I use perfume, and I value it only insofar as it serves my purposes. It has no importance beyond its capacity to serve my purposes, to be used by me. A perfume never spritzed may as well not exist. I use perfume to scent myself, to cool off, to derive a sense of pleasure. But wait, there's more.

Not that we need any more, but I came up with a new argument against the “Perfumery is art” thesis. Here's how it goes: Home fragrance is functional. But home fragrance differs from perfume not in kind but in degree. We occupy our home, and when we wear perfume we may serve the same function as a scented candle to those around us—and also to ourselves. I have many niche candles: Diptyque, L'Artisan Parfumeur, Sage, Bond no 9, elizabethW, Etro, and all of them smell every bit as splendid as the perfumes of those houses which they feature. 

At the other end of the home fragrance spectrum are found Febreeze spray, Yankee candles, Wick plug-ins, and the like. If we allow that niche candles are art, then how to exclude all of these less noble forms of home fragrance? And if we deny that niche candles are art, must we not deny that the fragrances which scent them are as well? So here we have another conundrum, beyond the concerns so incisively articulated by Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos and Christos at Memory of Scent.

While thinking about this issue again, in the light of recent developments in perfumery, I also began to realize that even if perfumery could be considered art in some rare cases, it will never be recognized as such, in a general way, for the following reasons deriving from the current state of Western civilization:

1. Reformulation. Whether because of the IFRA restrictions (and now IFRA-inspired EU regulations) or for more crassly economic reasons, the once-classic perfumes have undergone vast changes in composition. The same names are being used in most cases (one exception being Christian Dior Miss Dior), but for the most part, the perfume bearing the name of an icon from the twentieth century has changed enough to make it impossible to say much about that perfume in a general way. Yes, once upon a time it was rich and had incredible depth. Yes, today it may seem flatter and less inspired, but people will continue to buy it because its reputation precedes it, and people's reception is informed by what they are told that they ought to believe. In order for objective masterpieces of perfume art to be exalted by posterity, they must exist in the same form as they existed when earlier writers described them. Does the Osmothèque solve this problem? I think not, but that's another story.

2. House management. The twenty-first-century phenomenon of corporate conglomeratization has affected many aspects of business in all realms of consumer goods, but the implications may be starkest of all in the case of perfume. Why? Because the answers to all of the key questions determining the fate of a perfume are made by managers who may or may not have any interest in preserving the original perfume intact. Publicly traded companies, as Coty recently became, are beholden to stockholders, and healthy profit margins become essential if a manager is to retain his position, as all of them obviously seek to do (unless of course they resign).

Such a manager will do what needs to be done to see to it that the stockholders are happy with the way the business is being run. Stockholders in Coty may or may not care about the intrinsic quality of the products. Many people in the world could not care less about perfume, and CEOs may in some cases number among them. The only thing that we can really count on is that if quality happens to translate into sales, then quality will be regarded by managers as good. If, on the other hand, quality eats into profits, then it must be sacrificed. If it becomes more profitable to sell many bottles at a lower price than fewer bottles at a higher price, then the formula will be cheapened. 

The stockholders of companies, in their capacity as stockholders—and whatever their personal feelings about perfume may be—want profit . Perhaps as individual consumers they appreciate perfume, but they'll have no problem with procuring their fine perfume elsewhere, using the funds which they reap from whatever it is that Coty does to maximize profit in the case of its various subsumed brands.

3. Niche houses—and autodidact perfumers—today abound and continue to proliferate. This niche perfumery industry has obviously proven to be profitable, requires little initial outlay or even professional training, and gives the power to create and profit from the fruits of one's labor even with no background or history in the area. It's remarkable, actually, the marked distinction between perfumery and the (other) arts in this regard.

No one decides as a result of a mid-life crisis (or reasonable facsimile) that the time has arrived to become a concert pianist, though one never took any piano lessons as a child or adolescent. To publicly profess such a plan would probably be taken as a sign of mental instability, even delusions of grandeur. Accomplished pianists have spent years upon years training to achieve even basic competency, and even more years to achieve the skill of a master pianist. In perfumery in the past, more or less the same situation appears to have obtained, which is probably why so many perfumers were born into families whose business it was to produce perfume.

In the past, during the golden age of perfumery, the skill of a trained perfumer was handed down from generation to generation, not claimed to be acquired in a short period of time by someone who liked perfume and decided to try to make some from an assortment of fragrance and essential oils which he began mixing together in his kitchen or garage. Just as a fondness for instrumental music does not alone suffice to make one a skilled musician, is it not rather pretentious and insulting to the history of perfumery (not to mention unrealistic) to suppose that one can simply “decide,” with no prior education or experience in the subject, to be a perfumer, in fact, next week?

But anyone has the right to pick up a paintbrush and take a stab at landscape or portrait painting, so why should aspiring perfumers not be able to do the same? one may well rejoinder. People can do such things, of course, but the lack of training and attention to detail of a professional perfumer will likely be missing. For this reason, among others, I believe that most of the current niche firms will cease to exist in short order. Some of these people will decide to move on, perhaps to obtain a realtor's license or to open up a fast-food franchise store. With so many choices, so many established and very fine perfumers who have dedicated their lives to perfecting their craft, why should consumers invest their modest wallet share in the work of dilettantes? The answer is clear...

4. Hype is what appears above all to sell perfume in the twenty-first century. New is good, everyone seems to assume. The next big thing is always just around the bend, and people are willing to invest large sums of money to own bottles of the latest “it” perfume. Once they have invested, they become more apt to defend the integrity of their acquisition, so as not to feel like a dupe.

Given the current state of the industry, it seems safe to say that the golden age of perfumery is behind us. Why? Because most perfumes produced today are simple, linear, and abstract. They are essentially mixtures of a few components to produce a “pleasant” scent. Perfume making in the age of the multilaunchers, who put out several or even dozens of perfumes at a time, has become a matter of mixing a set number of ingredients together in every conceivable logical combination. Lego perfumery is not the exception but the rule.

This, my fragrant friends, is what the business of perfumery has become, and it is hard to see how anything might reverse the seemingly inexorable forward-marching trajectory to greater simplicity and more cost-effective and abstract scents. Because nearly everyone in the mainstream is doing this--and many in the niche category as well--anyone concerned to survive in the competitive market must do the same, and all the more because modern people's tastes are being transformed in the process. 

Not so long ago, the house of Clean hit on a market-viable idea: give all people, including those who have previously shunned perfumes, a product which they can feel comfortable with. How could anything be more naturally and intuitively appealing than the scent of being clean? Today abstract sweet laundry and shampoo and conditioner scents are being sold as perfumes. The process by which this "clean agenda" is being inculcated in modern consumers is precisely the same as the process by which Gabrielle Chanel convinced women that they should smell like aldehydes: seduction.

Market forces and consumer behavior are mutually reinforcing. When consumers are essentially told that good perfume is clean and simple and abstract, then that becomes their concept of perfume. Now that the companies holding the key formulas of the classic perfumes of the twentieth-century have capitulated to the “modern way,” we appear to be moving more and more toward a toiletry-centric conception of perfume, which will become less not more expensive and comprise a large number of "temporary" fragrances whose market life can be expected to become shorter and shorter in the age of Twitter launches and flankers. 

Given this state of affairs, I see no hope for the vindication of the "perfumery is art" thesis. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, as things currently stand, the art thesis is no more and no less than a marketing tack used by exclusive niche houses. It adds an extra appeal to some sorts of consumers not unlike the appeal enjoyed by a perfume which is explicitly associated with a celebrity's name. It's probably not a coincidence that the celebrity phenomenon has infected niche perfumery as well, with “rock star” perfumers worshiped by throngs of fawning perfumistas, when in fact most such perfumers are simply doing their job!

So there you have it, my fragrant friends, how I learned to stop worrying about art and enjoy my perfume for what it really is: functional fragrance. If we are honest with ourselves, we must own that, in our day-to-day use of perfume, the art question does not matter in the least. So long as we are able to use our perfume to serve our own purposes, then we'll continue to be happy that it exists. Calling our favorite perfumes "works of art" adds nothing to them whatsoever. They are what they are: collections of scents which fill us with delight whenever we wear and smell them.

Now I do believe that it is time for a bath.

I fell head over heels with Lanvin Arpège...

It happened, as it were, completely by chance, as I suppose these things always do. Who can predict what new arrival at the forefront of one's mind—a flickering image, a faint idea, a vague prospect heretofore unrecognized—may inspire an outpouring of passion? Does anyone possess the wherewithal, the sheer power to turn such a force of nature away?

Lanvin Arpège was the farthest thing from my mind back then, when I was still wearing Chanel Allure: sweet, nice, and linear—a scent for every time and every place, and my favorite especially to don right before embarking on a journey to a land far away. Gambling on new perfumes was never really an option. Subject my fellow passengers to the latest Dior Poison flanker? Or some blue aquatic nonsense which might be even more emetic than the food served on board?

No, and as a seasoned traveler, I knew that every single duty-free shop in the world carries Chanel, before anything else. Let's put it this way: if there were a duty-free shop in an airport in even the remotest corner of the universe, it would contain tester bottles of Allure eau de toilette and eau de parfum within arm's reach. It's as though Chanel has underwritten the very existence of such stores—along with the Toblerone chocolate company.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you, for it is indeed true that in my many travels abroad to destinations far and wide, I have come to depend upon Allure as a dose of serenity, a way to calm my frazzled nerves before boarding a plane which might in fact—it's all a numbers game—experience a malfunction, impelling in a flash all of the passengers in the congested cabin to dredge through the many otherwise meaningless prescriptions inscribed in the deepest fissures of their brain to locate this phrase, relevant at most one time in any person's life:

Affix your own air mask before helping a fellow passenger.

A prescription which I confess to have found equally applicable, mutatis mutandis, to my attitude in the morning when opting first to prepare coffee before acknowledging the existence of anyone else. It is also the basis—whether sound or not—of many a person's refusal to help another person in dire need, even the proverbial damsel in distress. Remember Kitty Genovese? Probably not. But that's another story.

Allure was perhaps the precursor to the twenty-first-century SSRI scents now flooding the market, impossibly inoffensive, while at the same time a pleasure to wear. A beautiful blend of floral and light oriental notes into a seamless, indivisible layer of sweet niceness. “Linear” they called it, and linear it was, indeed, as dependable as a German or a Japanese train. Nothing rank, nothing obtrusive, nothing ugly. The perfect solution for long journeys spent in close quarters with complete strangers brought together fortuitously by nothing more and nothing less than their shared desire to be somewhere else and virtually anywhere but there, suspended in air, 30,000 feet above the surface of the earth.

My first bottle of Allure was purchased in Toronto, where I spent a few days alone and found that I really did wish to don a perfume, though I had neglected to bring any along. I acquired the bottle blind from an upscale department store from which I was buying a red cardigan, having discovered that the temperature in Toronto even in the summer months was quite a bit cooler than I had been led to expect. Did I become attached to Allure because of the comforting companionship it provided during that short trip? Whatever the explanation may be, I went on to drain bottle after bottle of both the edt and the edp, habitually reaching for Allure as a safe yet simultaneously endearing scent.

To be honest, I do not recall the circumstances of my first encounter with Arpège, but it certainly was not in a duty-free shop in a land far away or nearby, as I have yet to see any perfume by Lanvin being sold in any airport store—or virtually anywhere, for that matter. Perhaps the glimmering globes are hidden on some lower shelf in a dark corner of some of these establishments, but no one makes any real effort to sell Arpège, in particular, unlike the pro-active, seemingly ubiquitous Chanel sales associates, as hopeful as the barefoot Hare Krishnas with their tambourines, who will spritz even unwilling passersby with Chanel no 5. Which is not however to deny that the ploy appears more often than not to have worked, a part, as it is, of a grand, five-hundred-year master plan for marketing No 5 as not just the best-selling perfume of the twentieth century, but of all time.

Arpège, in contrast, is quite a bit more caddy, perhaps even coy. One must seek Arpège out, and if one fails to do that, well, you may rest assured that Arpège could not care less. I was one of the chosen few, the truly fortunate ones to happen upon this splendid and arcane creation. Yes, it is true: I felt blessed. I emphatically did not seek Arpège out and did not even really know what I had found for quite some time after having acquired a bottle, which is probably why I do not recall when precisely that was. Arpège was somehow delivered to me, a scent literally heaven sent, as though someone somewhere, a metaphysical matchmaker of sorts, had determined that it was meant to be.

Yes, somehow those beautiful bulbous bottles made their way onto the top shelf of my armoire, as though conveyed by supernatural forces beyond my power to control. But all of the history leading up to the big event proves irrelevant in the face of what transpired next.

I fell head over heels with Lanvin Arpège and, yes, I fell hard. How did it happen? you may well be wondering. From nothing to love in the blink of an eye, it happens every time, as the world is transformed beyond recognition all over again.

I began to see what had seemed to be his icy stare—at times a piercing glare—for what it really was: clarity. The lucidity of a mind capable of penetrating the inner secrets of the soul through the application of logic alone.

In the beginning, Arpège did not seem to have much interest in me, and to this day I wonder whether he ever did. Always cold and aloof in our initial meetings, he was sometimes brusque to the point of being rude. Never one to hug and kiss à la française, Arpège was more apt to refuse even to accept an outstretched hand. Some no doubt thought that he was rude, like the drunk who approached me as I was preparing one afternoon to depart from my table in a restaurant bar where I had stopped for a quick snack after a strenuous shopping trip.

He bumbled his way over, managing even in his stupor to see that there was only one body there, not two, and that it was a woman, not a man. He extended his hand, introducing himself, as though I should be happy to see such a slob standing before me with leering bloodshot eyes. I signed my check, picked up my things and dashed to the door while he lingered behind exuding what he took to be righteous indignation that I should be so uncouth.

That, too, is perhaps how some, even many, may have viewed Lanvin Arpège, but I knew that there was more to him than that abrupt façade, so I adamantly refused to retreat. Fortunately, I ,unlike the pathetic drunk who accosted me on that otherwise peaceful day in a restaurant bar, was not hopelessly confused.

I learned to brace myself before each encounter, and soon found that if I gave him some time, his layers of complexity would unfold, unraveling like infinite bolts of silk before my eyes until at last I realized that he had crept into my heart, and I could not live without him anymore. I began to regard his brusqueness as endearing, his way of fending off what might otherwise be the hordes of suitors unworthy of him. Was he elitist? Without a doubt, but it was this, perhaps, I cannot tell a lie, which drew me to him before anything else.

In the beginning I wanted nothing more than the modest privilege of being but one among his little club of followers. As time progressed, however, I began to want more and more, until at some point I realized that I was ready to turn my life over to him. I fantasized about him constantly, while knowing that most everyone else was satisfied with Chanel no 5, what they had been indoctrinated to believe and indeed took to be the greatest perfume of all time. Like the throngs of couples assembled together to take their marriage vows before Sun Myung Moon, they incessantly gloated as though No 5, which they happened by chance to have found lying around, were the best new discovery since sliced bread. Wonderbread, I hasten to add...

They had not yet met Arpège, and having tied the knot to No 5, perhaps they never would. To me, of course, all of this was perfectly fine, and many of them to this day remain mired in their abject state of ignorance, the corridors of their mind as dark as the remotest recesses of Plato's Cave. I knew all along, deep down inside, that they were wrong, but I had no desire to disabuse them of the errors of their ways.

They had all been tricked by the hype, the slinky black dresses flaunting vast areas of bare skin, Chanel bling, and the promise of a luxury of which their lives were otherwise entirely devoid. They were sucked in, like lambs to the slaughter, completely unaware of what they were missing. I haughtily and, I suppose, selfishly declined to correct their mistakes. By now it should be obvious: I wanted Arpège all to myself.

Aldehydes, yes, we all loved our aldehydes, but Arpège offered so much more, so much complexity and depth on top of the aldehydes that there was really no point in comparing the two. Yes, aldehydes; yes, jasmine; yes, rose. But those were only the beginning for the noble Arpège, a treasure thankfully never tied to images of blonde bimbos and the nouveaux riches. So why in the world would I want to share with all of the No 5 bots the truth about Arpège:

top notes: aldehydes, neroli, bergamot

middle notes: ylang-ylang, rose, iris, jasmine, cloves, coriander, geranium, tuberose, lily of the valley

base notes: patchouli, vetiver, vanilla, sandalwood, styrax

Instead, Arpège could remain my private—or near private—stock while all of the wearers of No 5 would smell the same. Did they smell like Marilyn Monroe, like Catherine Deneuve, like Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman and Audrey Tatou? To me, if the truth be known—and why not, after all?—the odor wafting off their bodies was quite a bit closer to that of Brad Pitt after three days of hitchhiking on a dusty desert highway, cigarette butts and empty beer cans rolling and jostling about like tumbleweeds in the wind.

To me, more than an arpeggio, Arpège was the olfactory equivalent to Bach's Goldberg Variations, which, too, had drawn me in and seduced me to believe for a time that nothing in the world could be nobler and more worthy of my life than perfecting such a magnum opus. Could it be accomplished in a single lifetime? Evidently not, but nothing would stop me from trying.

So, yes, I openly admit to having become completely obsessed with Lanvin Arpège, so much so that I began to believe in the house of Lanvin, not just this one particular perfume, but the entire family. I suppose that I might have been a bit like the man I know who married the sister of his former wife after she was inexplicably murdered one day while doing nothing more than walking home from work in a neighborhood not too far from mine. I shuddered upon hearing the story of this crime which, like the one-out-of-three murders in the United States never solved, implies that cold-blooded killers are roaming free throughout our streets.

I shuddered because I wondered—and still do to this day—whether the man who married his wife's sister might have had something to do with his former wife's death. Perhaps the idea was planted in my mind by Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, a modern-day film noir in which a “well-regarded” ophthalmologist enlists the aid of his seamy brother to hire a hit man to dispose of his mistress, as she has become “troublesome”. Or was it Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice which caused these nagging questions to arise in my mind? I don't know. All I know for sure is that this woman was in fact killed by someone, for reasons which remain obscure, and hit men do in fact exist, so there must be people who use them. Therefore, it is indeed possible that this man had something to do with that death. Have I watched too many movies? Perhaps. But I digress...

The In-laws

I decided to order other Lanvin perfumes, first Eclat d' Arpège, which came in the clear spherical bottle stamped with the same iconic image of mother and child but in silver rather than gold. The perfume inside was purple, not brown, and the cap, too, had been newly designed. The presentation was stunning: the perfume and a body lotion to match were housed in a lavender-colored leather hat box with a zipper closure. Alas, despite all of these beautiful trappings, the perfume itself never worked for me, albeit not for want of trying. 

Later, I bought a bottle of Rumeur blind, still convinced that the noble name Lanvin sufficed to justify such a purchase scent unsniffed. To my disappointment, the opening of Rumeur was empirically indistinguishable from the smell of an organic chemistry laboratory. I worked in one for some years, and so, no, this is no metaphor. All of the fumes mingle together as they waft out of the many hoods, each with its artfully constructed distillation apparatus, shimmering glass bulbs and joints assembled to achieve the specific task at hand: to isolate and purify some precious chemical substance under precisely controlled temperature and pressure conditions by removing all of the unwanted “stuff”.

No, the fume hoods never seem to work very well in those laboratories, which is one reason why some of my colleagues occasionally joked that there was a reason why men in organic chemistry have a higher tendency toward baldness than do men in the general population. For decades, no one even knew that benzene was a carcinogen, so it was splashed about like water, along with countless other liquids presumed but never proven to be safe.

Rumeur improves over the course of a wear, but the opening is so difficult for me to bear that waiting for the magnolia at the end of the journey is not really a possibility. I swapped the attractive thick-glassed milk bottle facsimile away. I am aware that there are people who love and cherish Rumeur, but to me, the opening smells simply too close to carcinogens—or other toxins—for comfort.

After those two poor purchases, I began to become wary of Lanvin. I had heard tales of the reformulation of Arpège and decided that I'd best be satisfied with the bottles in my collection, since the very persons responsible for the new perfumes were undoubtedly those, too, who reformulated the love of my life at the time, Arpège.

I gave the house one final chance when they launched Jeanne Lanvin, which was not to my liking either and, having apparently been composed under the influence of the “muse” of marketing data, seemed to be more of an insult than a tribute to its noble namesake. After that, I wrote Lanvin off forever and stopped wearing even Arpège, ironically because I did not want to run out. I simply could not bear the specter of another tragic reformulation of what once was a masterpiece.

Alas, as a result of my very own attempt to grasp too many grapes, the story, I'm afraid, took an Aesopian turn for the worse...

A Change of Heart

I regret in some ways to admit, but it's true: over time, I eventually fell out of love with Arpège, as I began to wear more and more chypre perfumes and then became seduced even by the modern sweet patchouli chypres—La Perla was one of my favorites (until its reformulation)—to the point where Arpège began to smell wrong or off. Had my bottles turned? Or did I? Perhaps I'll never know.

Had I stuck with Arpège through thick and thin, 'til death or drained bottle did we part, then perhaps I would not have noticed the mutual transformations taking place in each of us. We might have been like the old couples celebrating their thirtieth, fortieth, even fiftieth anniversaries, who simply do not notice subtle changes from one day to the next—the flaking dead skin cells, the graying hair, the creaky voice, the flabby flesh, the wrinkles creeping like cobwebs—though the sight of their loved one at the beginning was quite different from that at the end.

What's done is done; what's gone is gone. But I can and do here attest: once upon a time, I fell head over heels with Lanvin Arpège. Of course, it is true: I was different person back then. Now I've pretty much moved on, though I'll pull out a bottle every once in a while, to take a short walk down memory lane.

I was reminded of my former love recently upon donning Lubin Nuit de Longchamp, which seems to be close to an Arpège facsimile to my nose. But I must confess that today it smells to me rather old. Do twenty-first-century women have any business smelling like aldehydes? Gabrielle Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin passed away long ago, so long ago, in fact, that I wonder whether it is not simply time for perfumery, too, to move on to the next big thing.

Overdoses of aldehydes now seem to me as old-fashioned as floral soliflores did to Gabrielle Chanel back when she insisted that her new perfume smell not like flowers but like a woman. Do women smell like aldehydes? Well, many certainly tried to for a full century, seduced by the idea that they were more glamorous than flowers. But they were seduced to accept the dictates of marketers no less than they are today. Was I, too, on some level, in some intangible way? It's hard to say.

Was I wrong to fall in love with Lanvin Arpège and then to fall back out of love again? What could that mean? They say that “all good things must come to an end,” and I do believe that it is true. But that doesn't prevent us from imaginatively rehearsing fond memories of them. And it certainly doesn't preclude the possibility of its happening again... Could I, should I rehabituate myself to aldehydes, so that I might fall back in love with Arpège?

The paradox of morality and the inexplicable unpredictability of love are two facets of the very same crystal: no one can argue anyone else into changing sides. It simply happens, like a gust of wind arriving on the scene to sweep one away into yet another fantasy for a brief period of time, a drop in the pool of eternity, until at last what was once passion becomes but a plaintiff sigh.

Perfume and the Pre-Socratics 7: Pythagoras and the Importance of Proportion

Pythagoras stands apart from the other pre-Socratic philosophers for having focused primarily on mathematics rather than observable phenomena to be explained in terms of other observable phenomena such as air, earth, fire, and water. In the view of Pythagoras, number is the first principle of the universe, which is ordered in a mathematical sense. The word cosmos, which means order, was first applied to the world by Pythagoras, although some of the other pre-Socratic philosophers are now referred to as cosmologists and regarded as the earliest scientists in human history.

The colony founded by Pythagoras is sometimes characterized as having been a religious cult of sorts, yet his prodigious contributions to the history of mathematics are beyond dispute and have to a large extent saved his legacy. Every child learns the Pythagorean theorem in grade school:

a² + b² = c²

The sum of the square of each of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of its hypotenuse.

Pythagoras was essentially the founder of the discipline of mathematics. In his view, embraced still today by modern thinkers, numbers reflect structures in the universe, beginning with 0, 1, 2, and 3, corresponding to the zero-dimensional point, the one-dimensional line, the two-dimensional plane, and the three-dimensional volume of space. Later mathematicians have worked in many more dimensions, but everything started back in ancient times with this man in awe of the mathematical beauty inherent in the universe.

Unlike Parmenides, whose contribution, that “All is one,” may escape attention by the vast majority of humanity past, present, and future, Pythagoras provided us with the foundations of all modern applied science and physics.

Many people dislike mathematics, or at least they claim to dislike mathematics. In truth, they appear not to understand mathematics. It was never presented to them in the proper way and from the proper perspective. They were forced by martinet schoolmarms to memorize the principles of mathematics rather than being taught how to deduce them.

As a result, mathematics remains for such people an arcane, inaccessible, and even painful subject. Because physics is the most directly mathematical of the sciences, requiring the use of many abstract formulas and mathematical concepts, it, too, has left many people with bad memories. Organic chemistry is another case where the logic of the theory must be understood in order to achieve an understanding of the profound beauty which it embodies.

It is unfortunate that many teachers of these subjects either do not themselves grasp the essential logic involved or else they are for some reason unable to communicate it to their students. The truth is that mathematics exhibits a profound beauty in its aesthetic simplicity and symmetry, as do the more theoretical of the sciences.

To see the patterns of mathematics in these disciplines requires that one ascend above the formulas to the spheres from which they derive, and this was naturally Pythagoras' strong suit. Among the theories devised by human beings, mathematics offers the one source of and glimpse into eternity, because nothing that happens on the planet which we happen by chance to inhabit will ever change the truths of mathematics.

Psychologists have discovered correlations between mathematical and musical ability, and not without reason: all of music is grounded in the proportions of mathematics. In this way the beauty of mathematics is inherent to that of music. Most people never study music seriously and have no idea why the compositions of J.S. Bach are perfect or what is meant when someone makes this claim, which may strike them as the ravings of a zealot. People who have never studied and played an instrument may enjoy music in a superficial way, but they will never be able fully to grasp the highest pleasure of musical art, to participate directly in its production, which can be likened to traveling to another sphere of reality.

Is there a parallel mathematical universe, where musicians and physicists interact? In a sense, yes. They are privy to secrets to which most people have no access. Plato, who arrived on the scene in ancient Greece a bit later than Pythagoras, attempted to capture the distinction between mundane appearance and eternal truth with his theory of the Forms and the Allegory of the Cave, to which, he claimed, most people are effectively chained. We remain mired in delusion and tricked by images cast on the wall by politicians and other shucksters who wield flickering candles to persuade us to believe in their opportunistic lies. Plato's Allegory of the Cave has never been more relevant than today, as images and packaging have come to take precedence over content in the internet age.

Plato was influenced by all of the pre-Socratic philosophers in one way or another, but his metaphysics reflects a belief in truth and and beauty clearly captured by the Pythagorean world view. The realm of knowledge is separate from the realm of opinion or mere belief, which is a fluctuating sea of ideas deriving from the contingent ephemera of the perceived world. Beyond the realm of the senses lies the realm of truth. This is the insight of Pythagoras which explains the magical effect of music and also the more mathematical sciences, at least to their practitioners.

It is probably worth observing here that in the worldview of Plato and some of his pals, art and beauty are not at all the same thing, despite the common tendency on the part of modern people to conflate them. Plato disliked poets because he thought of them as deceivers or even liars. Beauty and Truth are absolute and immutable Forms in which both instrumental music and perfume would seem to be able to participate because they cannot “lie”. Why? Because they are non-representational and therefore have no propositional content. 

All of this poses problems for people who erroneously conflate beauty and art. The two are conceptually distinct. A naturally existing canyon is beautiful. When Christo “wraps” it, he thereby creates a work of art—one which many local residents may regard as ugly. We shall return to the important distinctions between art and beauty, art and design, and truth and artifice, in future episodes of the History of Philosophy Refracted through Perfume.

Valley Curtain, 1970-2
by Christo and Jeanne-Claude

The Pythagorean-Perfume Connection

As we have seen in the other theories of pre-Socratic philosophers, perfume has been omitted or deleted from the version of the story to survive. It might seem that since the world of mathematics is divorced form the senses and the world of perfume is intimately connected to sense perception, that the two do not intersect.

By that argument, however, it should follow that because we apprehend music through our ears, therefore, it can have nothing to do with the eternal realm of mathematical truth. These misunderstandings arise when we make the same mistake as the schoolteacher who forces his students to memorize mathematical formulas rather than teaching them how to deduce them from first principles.

Most people wear perfume in the way in which they listen to music and balance their checkbook. They use perfume functionally, just as they use music for entertainment and numbers for the math needed to accomplish this or that task. Music is there in the world and they hear it, and perfume is there in the world, so they use it, But their limited appreciation of perfume's beauty is similar to the person who enjoys the chirping of birds or the sound of rain in the springtime. It's there, and they notice it, and it gives them pleasure, but that's where their understanding ends.

There is more to perfume than just the superficial scent, just as there is more to music than the sound waves by which we apprehend it. Pythagoras, as a master of mathematics, no doubt appreciated perfume as well, having recognized that the mathematical proportions so crucial to music are equally important to perfume.

Any professional perfumer will aver that the distinction between a masterpiece and a disaster may lie only in the proportions used. The ingredients of a perfume are obviously very important, but even more important, once the basic shape and demeanor of the perfume have been determined, are the precise proportions of the various components used. We laypersons might consider a comparison in the case of cooking: a dash of salt may perfect a batch of carrot ginger soup. A spoonful may ruin it by rendering it inedible.

Lists of notes are only the most basic way of approaching perfume. The experience of perfume is subjective and intimate, and the joy of perfume is found at the first level in the judicious proportions of ingredients combined by a skilled perfumer. But the perceiver contributes to the creation as well, just as the beauty of a poem emerges only upon its conscious appreciation by an interpreter. Poetry, too, pace Plato, exhibits mathematical proportions of cadence and rhythm, in addition to the use of colorful metaphors to produce something far more valuable than the sum of the letters used to write it.

Pythagoras no doubt recognized that perfume, like music and poetry, offers a transcendent glimpse into the only certainty in the universe: mathematics. The heavens may fall, but the truth will persist. The truth is unassailable. Behind all of the deceptive techniques used to market fragrances in the modern world, there is a reality. Not all that glitters is gold, and hidden treasures are out there, ready to be found by those who do not allow themselves to be distracted by all of the hype and folderol and focus instead upon the quality of the perfumes which they seek out and test.

We may disagree about which precise perfumes achieve a transcendent level of beauty, but that is because we perceive them from our own peculiar and idiosyncratic starting points, which are determined not only by our biological constitution, but also all of our past experiences and memories. Just as people exhibit various degrees of awareness about other aspects of reality, we should expect them to disagree, too, when it comes to perfume. We are all on a journey, and while our perceptions may sometimes coincide, often they do not.

The music of the spheres is ringing in the background, beckoning us to seek out the truth by whatever means available to us. We are fortunate to be among the select few to have access to perfume, through which we are able to travel to an olfactory universe unknown to the vast majority of humanity but nonetheless real.