Lessons Learned:The Serge Lutens Wax Sample Haiku Project

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Prolegomenon 

to Any Future Phenomenology of Perfume Perception

July was a very long month. How did this happen? Why did sherapop spend thirty-two evenings of her life with the Serge Lutens wax samples to the exclusion of all other possible posts here at the salon de parfum? you, my five remaining readers, may well be wondering.

It all started so simply, as these things always do. One small step leads to another, and then another, and then another, until finally an inexorable sense of commitment is formed, and one must follow through in order to finish what one has already begun.

That is precisely what happened in this case, believe it or not. I did not scheme for five months—from January 31 to July 1—about beginning the very first phenomenology of perfume experiment precisely on July 1, 2013. No, I did not. It happened completely by accident, or perhaps divine intervention—or reasonable facsimile (I am agnostic, after all). Something, some unknown force, led me on July 1, 2013, to pick up the attractive black wax sample folio which was sent to me last year by the house of Serge Lutens. I had thought before about when to begin sniffing the samples, but there was no real planning involved. Instead, I just pulled out one of the cards and began. It happened just like that, and I did not even realize the date, until I came to the salon to post the first wax sample haiku. But then, of course, it all made so much sense: thirty-two wax samples; thirty-two haiku. The first foray on the first day of July. The rest is history.

Yes, OCD kicked in, and I could not resist the pull to continue on and on and on. Once five were finished, then I was already committed. There could be no turning back. To stop then would have been to admit defeat. Now that it's finally over, and all six of us can finally breathe a deep sigh of relief, it is time to take stock. What were the lessons learned from this extended haiku holiday of sorts in the land of le grand Serge?

1. I learned that perfumes are nothing but a bunch of smells stuck together. They are no different from smells in nature except that groups of them have been clustered together, and that cluster has been christened some name (often arbitrary) and captured in a form where they can be found together again (usually in a bottle). Perfumers can be viewed as matchmakers of sorts, who bring together scents which are not married naturally in nature, but which work together harmonically. Sometimes...

2. When I sniffed each wax sample, I discovered that the different scents brought together were sometimes confusing and muddled and corresponded to no single and precise scene in reality. Could such a fixed marriage between seemingly incompatible scents be sustained? Or would they not represent a divorce waiting to happen, and accomplished through a bath?

3. No matter how cacophonous the mixtures sometimes seemed, they did, nonetheless, manage to remind me of groups of objects. Sometimes it took a couple of minutes, but eventually something more or less clear and distinct would pop into my mind.

4. Haiku ended up being a reasonably good way to capture small parts of my experience of these clusters of scents. In some cases, I had difficulty coming up with an image, because the cluster really smelled like nothing recognizable to me at all. But I was always able eventually to come up with an image or two or three of what the smell(s) reminded me of. The challenge then was to devise a haiku meeting the 5-7-5 syllable requirement. Sometimes I ended up changing the image, tweaking it so as to be able to conform to the rules. Perhaps a more honest phenomenological study would need to be completely free form, with no restrictions or requirements whatsoever.

5. It can be said without hyperbole, I think, that these wax samples served more as Rorschach tests than anything else, because the images evoked were deeply embedded in my mind, or created by combinations of other images deeply embedded in my mind. Once again, Christos of Memory of Scent has been vindicated: perfume, no matter the medium in which it is delivered, above all is this:
   
   

“a mixture of fragrant essential oils and aroma compounds, fixatives, 

and solvents used to create, modify and recall memories”

6. I do not have static memories. My memories are dynamically connected so that I'll think of one object and then another object and then another. When I attempted to conjure up a single image, I generally failed. Even when I came up with a scene, it was usually more like a film than a snapshot.

7. Throughout the thirty-two trials of this project, I felt a sense of liberation in knowing that I had never promised to be delivering reviews, so no one could really take issue with what I ended up conjuring in my mind and transforming into a concise text. In some cases, each line was a different image; in others, the lines were parts of a bigger image. Sometimes I felt that I was just making something up, but then I wondered to myself: how is making something up different from finding an image in my mind?

8. I have to admit that the haiku structure requirement made me feel a bit less free, but it also made this more fun than simply penning a free-form review. Despite the structural constraint, I still found haiku somewhat less stifling than the tugging sense of obligation to “capture” the scent for readers looking to find out “the objective truth” about a perfume. By this I do not mean to suggest that I agonize over my perfume reviews, but it seems that I do feel some sense of obligation to say something useful, which in my more reflective moments I regret, as I do not believe that reviews are ever objective, so the most that anyone can do is honestly to report their idiosyncratic experience and ideas. The “requirement” is really just this: explain how it is possible for a person to experience this perfume in certain very precise circumstances and at a certain time and under particular weather conditions and while in a certain mood. In other words, perfume testing is not really open to “scientific confirmation” at all, since it is impossible to isolate the variables or to reproduce the same experimental setting twice!

9. Lots of smells overlap, especially perfume smells. On several occasions I found myself erroneously guessing what the identity of the perfume was—usually either Fleurs d'Oranger or Arabie. Ironically enough, neither of those perfumes, which I had tested and reviewed earlier in liquid form, was included among the wax sample folios! Part of the reason why I kept thinking of those two perfumes was that so many of the Serge Lutens perfumes are either thick and powerfully floral (Fleurs d'Oranger) or spicy and heavy, with an emphasis on culinary scents (Arabie). Each time when I guessed that I must be smelling Arabie, in fact, it was something else entirely, albeit also something with heavy spices and dried fruits—at least to my nose at that time. It seems not unfair to say that a lot of curry and cumin is circulating about chez Serge, and it is clearly an acquired taste whether in cuisine or in perfume. On one occasion, I literally expressed gratitude outloud (and HRH Emperor Oliver can back me up on this) that I had been spared the curry and cumin that night through the benevolent intervention of the scent gods—or reasonable facsimile.

10. My impression from several tests of the liquid perfumes of this house remains that many of these creations are event scents, good for experiencing but not necessarily all that pleasant to wear, and probably not something which I wish to smell like to others. Some of the wax samples conjured negative and even ugly images. I did not like the way they smelled and would not want to smell like them nor to  smell other people who smelled like those perfumes.

11. Negative images were elicited by some of the wax samples during my initial wearing, as I devised my haiku, but a few of them ended up smelling much nicer later on down the line. Others, however, did not. As a result of my desire to finish all thirty-two wax samples during the month of July (with one running over to August 1), I was forced to modify my bathing schedule from summers past, when I often bathed in the morning. (Occasionally, on super-hot days, I have been known to take two baths, as my humble abode is air conditioning-free.) I found this year that I needed to take a bath at night, after my wax sample haiku session, for fear that the unpleasant or simply strong scent would induce nightmares in me. My concern on this front was caused by my knowledge that whenever I eat spicy food late at night, I have dreams about murder and mayhem. No, I am not joking, and I could not take that chance, as I had other things to do this month aside from the wax sample haiku.

12. I learned that whatever I attend to in the moment seems essential, but it's really just a selection, and had my focus been on something else, then that thing would have been essential, at that moment, to my mind. This confirms, again, my long-standing belief that perfume review experiences probably should not be stable, at least not for any perfume with a fair amount of complexity. Because I can only focus on one thing at a time, my take on a perfume will be a function of how much time I spend thinking about it. If I apply a perfume and then go do something else, I'm bound to miss many of its facets.

13. This selective attention problem helps to explain the sometimes radical divergence in opinion about a given perfume at fragrance community websites. Some people really focus in a dedicated way on a perfume over several hours; others take a whiff of the top notes and call it a day. These two approaches are bound to produce very different reviews, even by people who have had similar experiences in the past. Of course, none of this is new, but it seems to confirm some concerns expressed eloquently by Bigsly at Bigslyfragrance on a number of occasions. He is fond of reminding readers that he ignores top notes, but it seems clear from many reviews, that perfume wearers often have neither the time nor the patience to “wait it out”, so to speak.

All in all, this was a valuable learning experience, the most important lesson of which to my mind was that perfumes are really smells. As trivial as that may seem, I somehow find it profound. Perfumes evoke memories of groups of things because those or similar things have been smelled before in reality by the perceiver. In many cases, the smells are associated with other perfumes, but they are still things in reality which have been smelled before as distinct and isolable entities which can be found again and again, as someone somewhere decided to group a certain set of scents together and capture them in a small volume of space (again, usually inside a bottle).

These findings help to explain why laymen (by which I really mean nonperfumistas!) believe that perfumes are not works of art but scents, similar to the way in which the chirping of a bird is a sound, not a work of music. Phenomenologically speaking, that is precisely what they are, and although we may wish to lay an elaborate theoretical lattice upon our experience, in the end, comparisons to non-perfume scented things occurring either in nature or in man-made reality are no less valid, and probably more, in some ways. 

As I think about all of these matters, I continue to reflect upon the elizabethW magnolia candle which sits on a bookshelf close to the computer in my living room. I notice it only about once every several days—sometimes less often than that—but each time that I do, I find myself delighted by the scent and amazed that I had not the slightest perception of it for the several preceding days, during which it ceased to exist, for all intents and purposes, to my mind.

Entry #12: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Phenomenology, Phenomenological

After epistemology, phenomenology may be one of the most reviled philosophical terms. My distinct impression is that people dislike the word phenomenological as well. Why? Because nearly every time I use it, I am advised by someone or other not to. 

Most people know that the plural of phenomenon is phenomena. but when one uses the word phenomenological, eyes are likely to glaze over. It seems to be rather like saying (**^&^#^%#$@%$@%$@%$@%$@%! As in the case of utilitarianism, a fairly ordinary term, phenomenon, has been appropriated and modified by philosophers (especially Husserl, but Hegel, too, used phenomenology in an idiosyncratic way) to refer to a specific approach to knowledge. I used this word in a comment on the previous entry, so I figured that I'd better define it. 

Phenomenon in the vernacular means more or less the same as thing, with a connotation of being special in one way or another. Maybe that's how the word phenomenal came to mean something like extraordinary.

The term phenomenology refers to the examination of direct experience, the data as they present themselves to one's senses, without any knowledge of the objects which generate the data. Imagine looking at a book, without knowing that it's a book. It's just an object with a parallelopiped structure from various angles. How do you process this image? What can you learn from the direct experience of the image before your eyes?

In an upcoming post, I intend to give a better idea of what phenomenology is, but for the purposes of this entry, I'd simply like to observe that perfume would seem to offer a splendid opportunity—in fact, ideal—for phenomenological analysis, particularly when one samples blind, without knowledge of the house, the nose, the notes, or anything "external", which a phenomenologist would say should be "bracketed". 

If we can experience a perfume as a thing in itself, the manner in which we describe it will still, invariably, relate back to our idiosyncratic history (what we have experienced before), including our knowledge of other perfumes. If perfume is one of the best candidates for phenomenological analysis, yet even it poses problems—can you really smell aldehydes without thinking of Chanel  no 5?—this may signal that the project of phenomenology is doomed. Or perhaps it is just a bit too ambitious. Perhaps we can still learn from attempting phenomenological analysis of experience, even if it may not be possible to fully "bracket" all of our background knowledge.

Can you describe a perfume in terms of pure experience? Or must it always be mediated by a bunch of other theories, including knowledge of other perfumes? 

What say you, my fragrant friends?

Entry #10: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Emotivism

Empirical testing cannot adjudicate disputes when it comes to values. Let's take a case involving morality. You cannot argue a sociopath into believing that what he does is wrong, and you cannot show him anything in the world which proves that he should not do what he does. He feels no compunction whatsoever and will be deterred from acting however he wishes only by the law, specifically, the threat of punishment. He will carefully conceal his activities so as not to get caught, but the reason why he wants not to get caught is emphatically not because he cares what other people think. No, he simply wishes to retain his liberty to continue to do whatever he wants to do while "passing" as a normal person, as though he were moved by moral sentiment, within civil society.

One solution to the problem of disputes in matters of value more generally—both moral and aesthetic—is simply to deny that claims about value are anything more than the expression of the speaker's emotions. This is the gist of the theory of value known as emotivism, which offers a straightforward and simple way of understanding what people are doing when they argue about values or morality or aesthetics—or anything insusceptible of empirical testing.

Yes, we can observe a painting, and we can smell the scent of a perfume. But can we perceive that either of these are great works of art? No, the emotivist will insist. That sort of talk is a bunch of balderdash. Disputes in morality and in aesthetics are really much more about the disputants' reception of the objects than about the objects ostensibly under discussion. The speaker's attitude can be positive or negative. In this view, ranting about a perfume is akin to throwing a temper tantrum, no more and no less than a way of venting emotions. 

This perspective can make some sense of the otherwise difficult to comprehend tirades by people who seem to harbor a visceral hatred of the house of Creed. I've seen similar behavior toward Bond no 9 as well, and the question becomes: why should anyone care so much about these houses? No one is forcing them to buy, and if anyone finds the price incommensurate with the value of the perfume, then they are perfectly free to walk right on by. 

Instead, people often become highly emotional in denouncing especially Creed, blinded to the likelihood, given the large number of fakes circulating about, that the "swill" which they have sniffed wasn't Creed at all. The emotivist will reply that such strong emotional reactions betray the speaker's own peculiar issues. Maybe they'd be happier with a higher salary? Or less debt?

My distinct impression is that many perfumistas accept something like emotivism when it comes to perfume appreciation in venues such as the fragrance community websites. The tried and true adage one perfumista's treasure is another perfumista's trash leaps to mind once again. The entire enterprise of swapping relies on the fact that people disagree about the value of perfumes. Are some of them right and others wrong? The emotivist will say "No." There is no "truth" of the matter, in the way in which there is truth in matters of science.

Either the earth is flat, or it is not. It's not a matter of anyone's personal feelings about the question. Either a perfume has or has not been reformulated. If so, then it contains different ingredients or different proportions than it did at the time of its launch. That sort of question about a perfume can be answered through a procedure. Take a sample of the earlier perfume and a sample from a bottle produced later and have them analyzed using gas chromatography. You will find that either the graphs match, or they do not. If they do not match, then the perfume's composition has changed, regardless of the fact that it has kept the same name.

Yes, there are matters of fact when it comes to perfume: all of the facts which are amenable to scientific testing, according to the emotivist. What the emotivist denies is that someone's proclamation that a perfume is "one of the top ten of all time" means anything more than that the speaker loves the perfume.

We have seen this again and again in the perfume world, all over the place. In perfume reviews people may wax poetic about the ostensible object of their review, but in the end they tell us much more about themselves than they do about the perfume.

Emotivism may of course be false. It is a theory, after all—and a nonempirical one at that! Maybe there are value-laden facts about perfume. But if so, why do people not agree about what those facts are? Some people love Thierry Mugler Angel and Christian Dior Poison. Others find them abhorrent. What principles can be applied to adjudicate such disputes? To counter the emotivist's skeptical denial that value judgments are a matter of objective fact, one must come up with some way of resolving the disputes about value which arise among equally informed, equally intelligent people equipped with equally sensitive noses. 

People who wish to claim that their personal judgments about perfumes are authoritative, somehow more reliable or accurate than those of others, need to produce some basis for this claim. What is it about them that makes them uniquely qualified to judge the quality of perfumes? Or are such people merely projecting their tastes in perfume upon the world? That is the question, my fragrant friends.

Prolegomenon to any Future Phenomenology of Perfume Perception

Serge Lutens Wax Sample Haiku Project

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


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

Lessons Learned

Perfume and the Pre-Socratics 6: Democritus, Atomism, and Convention

Democritus, the next of the pre-Socratic philosophers in our History of Philosophy Refracted through Perfume series criticized Anaxagoras' explanation of qualities. Anaxagoras had hypothesized that the bits corresponding to the salient qualities of a thing are present in greater proportion than are the bits of other things. A bottle of Tom Ford Black Orchid contains a liquid which smells like Black Orchid because it is made up of many tiny little “Black Orchid” bits. His reasoning, to review, was in effect:

How could Black Orchid come from what is not Black Orchid, or Allure from what is not Allure?

In stark contrast, according to atomism, the theory championed by Democritus, reality comprises lots of different things which are made up of lots of little parts, but those parts are not direct or microcosmic reflections of the thing which they comprise. Instead, geometrical arrangements of smaller parts give rise to the emergent qualities which we perceive. The primary difference between the sort of Lego perfumery model presciently sketched out by Anaxagoras and the atomism of Democritus is that the small building blocks in the latter case have no color whatsoever, and between them are not other Lego blocks but the void. Atoms and the void are the basic components of reality according to the ancient Greek atomists.

The atoms—as Democritus and his mentor, Leucippus, did in fact refer to them—making up a perfume bottle are not tiny perfume bottles, or even pieces of glass. Nor does the liquid inside comprise individual “bits” sharing the qualities of the whole. Instead, the atoms are altogether devoid of such sensorily perceivable qualities. We do not perceive anything at all until the atoms have coalesced into much larger congeries. Out of nothing, something comes. Where there were no observable properties, suddenly they pop into our view, becoming a part of our reality because they are experienced by us.

The atoms have extension and shape, but they possess no qualities perceivable by human beings through their sense organs alone. It is only when the atoms are brought together in certain combinations and proportions that such qualities arise, emergently, out of the arrangements of individual atoms. Between the atoms is space.

Sound familiar? Yes, Leucippus and Democritus did indeed anticipate modern theories of chemistry, according to which all objects, including perfumes, comprise molecules, and all molecules are built up of atoms. Chemistry has obviously been refined over the more than 2,000 years since these pre-Socratic thinkers amazingly hit on something like it by casting about in an aim to understand the world in which they found themselves. We now identify the atoms in question as Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, etc. The early atomists knew nothing about the scientifically hypothesized atoms of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Was it just a lucky guess, a stab in the dark? My hunch is that their bold conjectures were based on their first-hand experience of perfume.

Perfumes which look empirically indistinguishable often smell wildly different. How to explain this disparity in perception? The problem with Anaxagoras' theory was that all things were said to be made up of things which they resemble. This does not help in explaining the distinction in smell between two liquids of the same color. 

Take some perfumes by Annick Goutal with similar shades of color, say Quel Amour, Eau d'Hadrien, and Petite Chérie. These perfumes smell radically different. What makes these perfumes distinct, despite their visual similarities, is not that they comprise tiny bits of, respectively, Quel Amour, Eau d'Hadrien, and Petite Chérie.

Why, again, do beautiful, fully composed perfumes comprising high-quality materials, such as Miller Harris Jasmin Vert or Géranium Bourbon or Figue Amère smell so different from a vat-produced chemical soup which induces dread and malaise in the wearer? (The selection of examples is left as an exercise for the reader.) It is not because the former are made up of tiny homuncular (so to speak) bottles of great perfume. No, something else must be going on, the atomists correctly inferred.

Yes, today, with the benefit of hindsight, we perfumistas can see that, thanks to the early Greek atomists' felicitous encounters with perfume—edited out of the history of philosophy, but nonetheless true—these thinkers incredibly developed a theory which we reach for still today in attempting to make sense of our experience. True, atoms have by now been split (they were thought back then to be indivisible), but it is at the level of atoms and molecules where our ordinary scientific understanding and its folk applications end.

True, one can dig deeper, if one wishes, but theories of multidimensional strings are not going to provide much insight in attempting to understand why when an ebay hawk or grey market decanter dilutes a perfume it smells weaker than it did before. We modern people pretty much call it a day at the level of chemistry, which helpfully explains all sorts of empirical phenomena readily observable by us.

Colligative properties such as freezing point depression and boiling point elevation are good examples. Why does making a sorbet with a touch of alcohol added yield a softer outcome than a sorbet mixture to which no alcohol is added? Why does pouring salt on the sidewalk in wintertime prevent ice from forming?

We can even understand in the basic concepts of organic chemistry why trans-fats are worse than cis-fats. Chemistry offers satisfying answers to these questions. Digging deeper is possible, and physicists certainly do that when they go to work in their laboratories, but good luck trying to grapple with aspects of everyday existence—becoming—through appeal to strings. You may as well just return with Parmenides to the realm of Being!

Where there was no Jean Patou 1000, suddenly it appeared, in a grand creation act, as though plucked from a magician's hat, when an assortment of atoms (in molecules) were juxtaposed in just the right way and in the right proportions. That's pretty much all that we need to know, and all that perfumers need to know as they scrupulously document their new formulas so that it will be possible in the future, to reproduce over and over again—should anyone choose to do so—the final combination of ingredients which make up what has been christened a new perfume.

Democritus was a materialist interested in mechanical explanations of phenomena. He was a “How?” man, not a “Why?” man. For this reason, some historians have considered him to be more of a protoscientist than a philosopher. In fact, his predilection for mechanical explanations was itself a philosophical position, in some ways anticipatory of modern pragmatism. What works is valid, and what does not work is invalid. That is the essence of pragmatism, in a nutshell. And it rings true for perfume as well.

An iconic perfume has succeeded in carving out a new spot of previously uncharted territory on the grand olfactory map. A second requirement, for even a highly original perfume to achieve true icon status, is that it enjoy widespread market success. Many perfumes carve out new spots of previously uncharted territory, but for one reason or another they are market flops. Usually they are discontinued. Only iconic perfumes hit on a formula which appeals to a sufficient number of consumers to warrant keeping the perfume in production. But the contribution of the house, its willingness and ability to market the perfume is even more important to contemporary recognition than is the nature of the creation itself. The Britney Spears perfume collection has reaped millions upon millions of dollars of profits.

Curious, Fantasy, In Control Curious, Midnight Fantasy, 

Believe, Curious Heart, Hidden Fantasy, Circus Fantasy

(Not Pictured: Radiance and Cosmic Radiance)

Materialism and Hedonism

The retention of the same name for what has become a different perfume, as in the case of Guerlain Mitsouko, or the preposterous renaming of Miss Dior Chérie as Miss Dior, may on its face appear to provide confirmation of the Parmenidean view on the realm of becoming, that it is the realm of falsehood and illusion. Then again, Yves Saint Laurent Champagne was also renamed, to Yvresse, not because of a blunder on the part of some officious executive wishing to leave his grimy fingerprints on the perfume, but because of a testy dispute with French champagne makers over what they took to be the inappropriate use of that term.

Everything is fair game in the realm of becoming, and people will do what they will do in order to get what they want. But if all acts of naming are a matter of convention, then is anyone really to blame for retaining the name of a formerly great perfume and using it to label a less noble variant of the same? Whatever works, works. What does not work, does not work. We find ourselves, my fragrant friends, yet again, in the realm of Parmenidean tautology, now in the service of an eminently non-Parmenidean philosophy!

In a materialist world view such as that of Democritus and the atomists, everything, including morality, is a matter of convention. There is no higher power; there are no laws written in invisible ink in the sky; and there is no afterlife—whether filled with heavenly bliss or eternal damnation. What you see—or sniff—here and now, on planet earth, is what you get.

In this sort of world view, materialistic hedonism, there is no pure and absolute, immutable essence or Platonic Form of Perfume (to anticipate a bit future episodes of this lengthy story...). No, perfumes are short-lived, fragile creations, creatures of sorts, kept in existence only for so long as they prove to be profitable to someone somewhere. It's not enough that a perfume once launched be loved; it must also earn its right to continue to exist.

Once a perfume has ceased pulling its weight, so to speak, perfume houses simply pull the plug. From the hard-headed perspective of pragmatically oriented materialists, vain attempts to re-create the perfumes of centuries past are futile efforts to change the structure of reality as conceived by naturalistically minded thinkers such as the atomists of ancient Greece.

One interesting implication of a hedonistic picture of perfume appreciation—such as seems clearly to be implied by the atomism championed first by Leucippus and Democritus, and later by Epicurus (who, too, will be discussed in more detail in a future episode...)—may be that many perfumistas, in their enthusiasm to exalt perfumery as an art, give short shrift to the impact of marketing on our reception of perfume.

This picture lends weight to the idea, discussed in The Bottle Controversy, that the vessel in which a perfume is housed and travels and from which perfume is drawn, being a sensorily perceived object, is no less worthy of our attention because it is no less capable of producing pleasurable sensations in us. The question becomes: in terms of the overall pleasure derived, is the bottle less important than the scent inside? While it is true that the bottle can lead one deceptively to buy a perfume which does not deliver on the promise of its packaging, the same can be said of advertising more generally. In fact, that is what advertising is: seduction, pure and simple. Do you really need that item or gadget—or bottle? Advertising has as its aim to convince you that you do.

There is a substantive sense in which the bottle contributes to the overall success of a marketing campaign. But there is a difference: the bottle is an independent object, designed by someone somewhere no less than was the perfume, and therefore potentially worthy of our regard. It, too, exists to our sensory organs because a group of atoms and molecules have been brought together and arranged in a particular way so as to affect our sensory receptors. When the sight or touch of a bottle provides pleasure, then it has just as much value as any other source of pleasure, including the scent of perfume. 

That, at any rate, my fellow fragrant travelers, is the way in which the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus appears to have viewed these matters.