What happens at IFF doesn't always stay at IFF: Gottlieb and Grojsman face off

Of Vats and Vaults, Toilets, Truffles and Top notes

As a part of my admittedly quixotic quest for olfactory omniscience, I have made it my mission to watch every single film with any perfume or scent reference. (Please leave comments with any suggestions you may have!) Using perfume as a search term in my library's database, I recently happened upon an obscure PBS Nova miniseries episode produced back in 1995. The Mystery of the Senses: Smell is not a feature-length film but a 56-minute educational video intended for people like me who are interested in learning about scent.

Even knowing all of this, I must confess that I found my thumb hovering threateningly over the eject button of my DVD player's remote control as I watched and listened to the cringe-worthy opening of this production. The text is narrated by Diane Ackerman, author of The Natural History of the Senses, in a truly annoying tone befitting of a junior high school biology teacher. For your pleasure, I provide the text and a few images from the opening scene:

We're about to embark on a journey through the world of smell. And we're going to start at the Statue of Liberty, of all places, where a real smell-celebration is in full swing.

The fireworks are for Champagne, a new Yves Saint Laurent perfume.

This is Champagne's gala coming out party—the perfume, not the drink.

It's amazing how much sensing happens at a snazzy shindig in the dark. There's lots of conversations to hear, and sights to see, and there's plenty of tasting ... to work off. There's touch.

This is a fabulous party, 

and all for the sake of a smell!

That should suffice. You always know that what you're watching is really lame when your eyes shunt back and forth between the minute counter clock on the DVD player and the screen. Nonetheless, I decided to stick it out. How bad could it really be? I asked myself as I calculated the remaining 53 minutes left to endure. In the end, I was very happy to have invested just under an hour of my life to learn what I learned from this film.

It wasn't watching male cockroaches attempt to copulate with a rod just dipped in female cockroach hormones which redeemed The Mystery of the Senses: Smell. (Sorry: no screen shots, as I have a deep fear and loathing of insects and also prefer not to draw entomologist traffic to this site. Porn enthusiasts already flock here in search of “group orgy”, “prostitutes”, and the like. Believe it or not, such search terms bring more new visitors to the salon de parfum than even “Luca Turin divorce”!)

Nor was I especially smitten with the smart scene where Ms. Ackerman, in her bright red dress and facial foundation two shades too light, sashays into a steam room and does a quick twirl toward the camera amidst several hairy-chested, virile-looking, towel-clad men to proclaim, after drawing a deep breath through her nostrils: 

It really does smell good in here!

Nor was I particularly impressed by the scuba diving clip in which Ms. Ackerman dodges sharks while she explains, with increasingly irritating and inappropriate voice inflections (anyone who has ever listened to AM radio knows what I am talking about...) in a didactic and corny narration along the lines of the above, that undersea creatures such as the lobster which she brings up to eat for lunch are capable of navigating their course underwater by following scent trails.

I felt that the segment on drug-sniffing dogs working for the Feds at an airport and a shipping dock could have been edited out without loss since on the day of the filming the dogs found nothing, making it all seem rather anti-climactic, especially given the suspenseful musical score playing in the background.

An olfactory scientist's ability to literally wave his nose back and forth over the opening of a Chanel no 5 perfume bottle was, I own, mildly amusing. He apparently has extra muscles in his nose or has somehow trained it to move as though it had joints!

I confess, too, to having enjoyed the repeated and graphic demonstrations that skin chemistry is very important to scent perception. 

A brief segment on olfaction instructs viewers as to the process by which we recognize scents: it's a matter of molecular shapes inserting themselves like keys into receptor “locks”.

I enjoyed traveling with a Bedouin-like man by camel over desert terrain to find gnarled trees in which frankincense is hidden. 

He harvests some of the blobs of this resin and then returns home to negotiate a price with a big frankincense dealer. 

This segment was truly educational to me, as I did not formerly know that frankincense was a resin tapped from trees like sap. 

A short excursion to Oman, the true source of the current oud fad  (pace Pierre/William/Ammar) is equally rewarding.

But the undeniable highlights of this film are three. First, the segment featuring a perky little sow on the hunt for truffles, which—I had no idea before this viewing—are sought because they happen to bear the scent of boar musk within them!

Yes, believe it or not, female pigs burrow into the ground to dig out truffles because they believe themselves to be finding a mate! What a revelation. I honestly had no idea. 

A friendly French farmer preparing a truffle omelette slyly confides with slanted eyes that truffles have aphrodisiac effects upon human beings as well!  Ooh, là, là!

All of this excitement and talk of pheromones naturally got me thinking about the possibly biological basis of the age-old “Cats or Dogs” dichotomy. Perhaps it really does come down, in the end, to pheromone receptors! The people who dislike cats often love dogs, and vice versa. Some people, of course, go both ways.

The second big eyeopener of this little film involved a visit to a factory where fragrances are produced. I have often referred to “vat-produced chemical soup” in my negative reviews of what I find to be unwearable fragrances (not worthy of the name perfume...), and in The Mystery of the Senses: Smell, all of my suspicions were confirmed about the various kinds of errors which may arise when factory workers mix together perfumes in large vats.

Ever wonder about batch variations? The nearly infinite possibilities for mistakes are revealed in a few snapshots of the inside of one of the places where fragrances are produced in bulk volumes. All it would take would be one tiny error: a mix-up on the tank, the spigot number, the measurement line for the proper amount to add, a distracting cellphone call, a foreman's illegible scrawl...

After this incredibly insightful look at the inside of one of these fragrance factories, I realized that it's very nearly a miracle that any two different batches ever smell anything alike! 

Small wonder that big perfume houses feel that they can reformulate with impunity. Mistakes are and can only be made! Oh well.

The third, and by far most important part of this educational film, for perfumistas, is the rare glimpse which it offers into the behind-the-scenes workings at International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF). 

Viewers are treated to such exquisite sights as a perfumer and his manager arguing animatedly over a toilet about whether a new cleaning scent contains too much pine—and (because the manager thinks that it does) what to do about it.

Again, a perfumer and his supervisor hover over a freshly shampooed head, which, they come to agree, smells too sophisticated, too floral, and needs more fruit to be able to appeal to younger consumers! 

So there you have it, my fragrant friends: the ultimate source of the fruity-floral tsunami of fragrances being put out today. These supervisors and managers working behind the scenes at IFF—and elsewhere, I presume—are requiring perfumers to modify their creations to fit prior shared conceptions of what toilets and young women should smell like!

La crème de la crème of The Mystery of the Senses: Smell is without question the portion devoted to perfumer Sophia Grojsman as she struggles to compose a perfume which will please fellow perfumer Ann Gottlieb who, rather than working as a perfumer, wears the client's hat, as she is representing the company for whom Grojsman has been enlisted to produce the perfume on behalf of IFF.

Grojsman expresses manifest frustration at having been asked by her employer to produce a men's fragrance, given that she specializes in women's floral accords. She also complains at one point that the powers that be at IFF have decided that she works better under pressure, so now they all “step on my neck”!

That what Grojsman says is indeed true becomes clear in the scene in which she and Gottlieb face off over Grojsman's fragrance submission. Gottlieb has the power in this relationship, representing as she does the company who will have the final say on whether Grojsman's new composition will be launched as a perfume. 

Gottlieb complains that Grojsman's fragrance needs a fresher top note, and she provides a liquid example of what, as she puts it, “we'd like to see built into your submission.”

All of this takes place on Friday afternoon. The group comprises representatives from both sides: the client, led by Gottlieb; and IFF, with Sophia Grojsman as the target of criticism for having produced a perfume (gasp!) unacceptable to Gottlieb! The group decides to reconvene to evaluate Grojsman's modified submission on Monday afternoon at 2pm. The Friday meeting is thus adjourned and, from there, presumably all of the bureaucrats and Tzar Gottlieb go home to enjoy the weekend. 

Meanwhile, Grojsman toils away nonstop in her laboratory, assistants by her side, attempting to produce Gottlieb's desired fragrance by the looming deadline.

Grojsman's weekend struggle is ultimately for naught, as the fragrance is rejected and the formula relegated to the vault of perfumes composed but never launched, an official failure. Why? 

Because the client rejected what Grojsman produced for having failed to be what the client wanted it to be.

Discussion

In The Mystery of the Senses: Smell, Gottlieb comes off looking like something of a villain, towering over Grojsman and browbeating her into producing what Gottlieb wishes to smell. Given this derogatory depiction, I feel obliged to observe here that I myself am in fact a fan of perfumer Ann Gottlieb, who was the nose behind two quite original creations: Sarah Jessica Parker Covet, a bizarre lavender-chocolate fougère, and Calvin Klein Contradiction, an oddly indescribable and equally appealing eucalyptus-fruity-oriental perfume. 

Both of these compositions are admired and even loved by me and, perhaps precisely for their sheer eccentricity, both have been discontinued. Gottlieb created these innovative and challenging perfumes and obviously had the gumption to stand up to her clients. Covet and Contradiction, albeit now discontinued, were in fact launched. Alas, these perfumes fell prey to the tyranny of the market, to whom the companies which produced them are beholden. Businesses, lest anyone forget, are intrinsically profit-seeking entities.

In the scene in which Gottlieb appears in The Mystery of the Senses: Smell, she is the boss, exerting near tyrannical power over Grojsman, whom many, however, regard as a better perfumer. Certainly, Grojsman's résumé boasts far more success stories: Estée Lauder White Linen and Beautiful, Calvin Klein Eternity, Yves Saint Laurent Paris and Yvresse (originally launched as Champagne, the perfume being celebrated at the opening of this production), Lancôme Trésor, Bvlgari Bvlgari pour Femme. The list of Sophia Grojsman-designed bestselling perfumes literally goes on and on and on...

I must reiterate that the face-off between Gottlieb and Grojsman presented in this video was very surprising to me, as I have always regarded Sophia Grojsman as the perfume artist par excellence, if any perfumer is an artist at all. That is, in effect, the question pointedly raised by The Mystery of the Senses: Smell, and it makes the short film well worth any perfumista's time to see the reality of what perfumers are doing when they agree to work for clients who have the final say on whether a new creation makes the grade, deserves to be launched and therefore exist.

The fact that Ann Gottlieb, a considerably less well-known and less well-regarded perfumer than Sophia Grojsman should be able to issue a fate-sealing judgment on one of Grojsman's creations constitutes a serious reality check for those who persist in insisting that perfumery is an art. Watch this film, please, if you can find a copy somewhere—anywhere—and then ask yourself whether the kind of pressure under which Grojsman is placed, forced to modify her creative output to reflect the values of other people—and ultimately to please their, not her tastes—can properly be considered artistic creation. To me, this little film provides an iron-clad, definitive proof of what Bryan Ross over at From Pyrgos has been saying all along:

Client-commissioned perfumery is design.

What all of the perfumers at IFF are doing—whether they work in the toilet bowl cleaner area or around the shampoo sinks or in an elaborate workshop such as Sophia Grojsman's, where iconic perfumes are born—is the same. Yes, scents for toilet bowl cleaners and shampoos are created in the same way, with negotiations and concessions being made by clients and contracted perfumers. Should we say, then, that all of the perfumers working at IFF are artists?

One thing is clear: if the word artist is to mean anything, then it must delineate a contrast class. The question becomes: who are the non-artists among all perfumers? If, as Chandler Burr ("The Curator") suggested in an interview for a piece at the Daily Beast regarding his new "olfactory art" exhibit (at the Museum of Arts and Design), even the person who created the scent for Coppertone suntan lotion is an artist, then it starts to sound as though anyone who produces new scents is automatically an artist. In the case of this naïve—or ignorant, if you like—use of artist as an emotive form of approbation, the term simply refers to anyone who produces something which we appreciate. What many in the "perfumery is art" camp fail to grasp is that the question of whether perfumery is art is not a question about whether perfume is a good or worthy thing. It is, rather, a conceptual question.

If every perfumer is an artist, then why not every chef and gardener and wine producer? Are candle and soap makers and bakers also artists in this sense? Well, then why not everyone else who does anything else we value, too? Why not farmers, civil engineers, school teachers, and heads of state? All of these people apply their intellect to generate creative solutions and reach certain goals: crop rotation, irrigation systems, interdisciplinary classroom curricula, five-year plans. Are these all supposed to be artworks, too?

We should not blind ourselves to the implications of this sort of promiscuous application of the term artist to everyone and his mother, brother, sister, father, cousin, niece and nephew.... In the end, if everyone is an artist, then no one is an artist. The label has been evacuated of all meaning. Why not, then, simply honor the perfumers who excel at their trade by identifying them as “great”?

Paper, Skin, or... Cat Fur?

A Modest Proposal

How best to test new perfumes is a matter of some controversy. Many counters today have tester bottles out on display, but do not offer take-away samples, making it prohibitively difficult to give a fair trial to more than a couple of perfumes in a single afternoon. It all becomes too confusing when one attempts to spray a different perfume on each side of the neck, on the inside and outside of each arm, on the décolleté and whatever random piece of skin might happen to remain free of scent.

To make matters worse, few of us are willing to forgo our morning application of perfume in anticipation of a merely possible visit to a counter. Consequently, more often than not, we are already wearing a perfume when we layer others on top, and this compromises—if it does not totally obstruct—our ability to get a good sense of a new scent unamalgamated and unadulterated by whatever we happen to be wearing that day. In the end, many of us who take perfume seriously have difficulty assessing fragrances by such means, among other reasons, because one cannot really “inhabit” the perfume in such a way, certainly not in the manner in which one does when one dons a single perfume for the entire day.

The pseudo-perfume powder “samples” included in fashion magazines for massively advertised launches by the largest, most corporate of houses strike serious perfume-lovers as, at best, unhelpful, at worst, downright deceptive. The substance on those samples is, by definition, not the same as the perfume which they claim to represent. Still, the debate continues to rage over whether it is possible or not to get a fair idea of the essence of a perfume through sniffing it off a paper testing strip.

On the one hand, it may seem that the only way to get a sense of several perfumes during a visit to a counter at a house or department store is to avail oneself of the omnipresent paper strips strategically placed in cups always within arm's reach. On the other hand, presumably no one will deny that paper is not skin, that they differ very much in chemical constitution, and therefore there is little if any reason for believing that perfume will express itself in the same way on these two quite different media. Even worse, the development trajectory of a complex perfume is bound to elude the sniffer who depends on paper strips, if only because no one holds the strip to his or her nose over the course of the hour or so that it can take a complex creation fully to unfurl.

Paper strips may be ideal from a marketer's perspective, provided that the perfume which they are concerned to sell happens to have a beautiful, even if fleeting, opening. Assuming that many sales are made at the counter, on the spot, it would seem that consumers are often seduced by the top notes rather than waiting to see how the perfume might smell in a few hours. Although some perfumes are linear, even in those cases, it is as though longevity is removed from the equation when sales associates attempt to sell a new perfume to a customer on the basis of a quick sniff off a paper strip.

I have heard some people suggest, nonetheless, that the use of paper strips by professional reviewers is a way of cutting through the variables introduced by individual persons' unique skin properties, the temperature, pH, sebum level, etc., which obviously differ from case to case. The paper strip advocate who argues along these lines is assuming that skin chemistry is a relevant factor in determining how a perfume plays out, and wishes not to be misled about the properties of the perfume as they manifest themselves on some other person's skin, non-identical with the person seeking counsel about which are the best perfumes. The problem with this view is that it assumes that the differences between any given person's skin and a strip of paper are less pronounced than the differences between the skin of two distinct wearers. This strikes me as quite dubious, to say the least.

What about the “skin chemistry is much ado about nothing” camp? Presumably they will aver what no reasonable person can deny, that paper and skin are nothing like one another. This would seem to imply that denying the relevance of skin chemistry should actually give one more faith in reviews based upon skin than on paper tests, since different people's skin properties are much more similar to one another than any of them is to a strip of paper, or so it would seem.

Oddly enough, some people appear to deny the relevance of skin chemistry and yet still depend on paper strips when it comes time to pen reviews. This strikes me as a path leading directly to error, as the person is bound to interpret the perfume not as it would smell on wearers, but as it would smell on dead trees. No one applies perfume to trees, do they? It would seem, then, whether one subscribes to the skin chemistry irrelevance hypothesis or The Myth of the Skin Chemistry Myth, that perfume really should be tested on the skin. Or should it?

In all of this debate over paper versus skin, an important third way has been up until now entirely ignored. I come to you today with a new idea which may initially sound outlandish, but which, on reflection, I believe may finally bring a halt to the skin versus paper debate. The reality, my fragrant friends, is that far more important to how our perfume smells on us to us, is how our perfumes smell on us to others. Accordingly, in order to appreciate the true value of a perfume, we would be much better off smelling it on someone else.

One especially vexing difficulty arises from the very fact that we may develop a tolerance to our own perfume and may not even be able to detect it after a while. This problem is a real one, a fact nowhere better illustrated than in the case of persons who, entirely unaware of how they really smell, overapply their perfume to the point where they become unpleasant to be around, if not totally intolerable. So, what to do?

Unfortunately, we cannot spritz a sales associate and bring him or her home with us, continuing to sniff as the perfume develops and ultimately dries down to its later and longest phase. However, I recently happened upon a solution to this problematic situation in my very own home. It turns out that HRH Emperor Oliver (my cat) has an uncanny way of smelling scrumptiously wonderful the day after I have worn certain perfumes. I often marvel at his resplendent perfumic beauty, which is captured for me as a form of souvenir of how I must have smelled the previous day—or at least I hope! Did I really smell that great? I wonder on the day after I donned Hermès 24, Faubourg. Again, if I wore La Perla one evening, I am reminded of that fact the following day as the perfume continues to waft gorgeously off my cat's fur.

What I am proposing is that, rather than resorting to scraps of paper bearing no relation to our skin, and rather than depending upon our own perception of how a perfume plays out while we walk around in it, we have a third option: to avail ourselves of the divinity of felinity and, specifically, the capacity for the faithful conveyance made possible by the fine palette of our cat's fur. I myself have found this to be a fail-safe, fool-proof method for identifying perfumes which may seem to have a superficial appeal, but which reveal their less noble properties the following day, when I find myself saying, Oh, no, did I really smell like that?

Some may obstinately proclaim: I wear perfume for myself and myself alone! and in this they are not alone. But we all live in an intersubjectively shared universe, and it is a fact that sometimes we need to be told what we perhaps find unpleasant to hear. If your perfume or your manner of perfuming yourself stinks, then you will only harm yourself by permitting the number of people sharing this view to augment with each passing day.

The zipper of your fly is down; spinach is trapped between your teeth; a piece of toilet paper is stuck to the bottom of your shoe and trailing behind you everywhere you go. I ask most sincerely: Would you rather be informed of this embarrassing state of affairs by the first or the four-hundredth person to notice? This is where cats can step most helpfully into the perfume picture: to let us know, in no uncertain terms, what we really need to know about the perfumes which we choose to scent the air hovering about us wherever we go and readily detectable by everyone we meet.

Now, lest the people at PETA become alarmed at my modest proposal, I would like to clarify that I never spritz perfume directly on my cat's fur. Instead, he manages to lift enough off my skin by sidling up to me—which he himself chooses freely to do—that I can effectively sample the perfume the next day simply by nuzzling the nape of his neck or the top of his head. Great perfumes reveal all of their beauty through this mode of presentation, and mediocre perfumes are exposed for the imposters that they truly are.

But the highest virtue of my cat's ability to sift the wheat from the chaff, the carp from the bass, is that he will not even get near me on days when I am wearing a perfume which no one in the universe should be wearing. Yes, it has happened: my cat has fled upon sensing my approach on occasions when I have worn a concoction so synthetic, so vile, so repulsive to his ultrasensitive sense of smell, that he scrupulously avoids coming in contact with me.

Lest anyone forget, a cat is the quintessential rationally self-interested creature. Sure, cats have been valued by ignoble, calculating types throughout history for their ability to keep larders free of mice. The truth, however, is that never have the cats who have agreed to fulfill such helpful functions been used as chattel. No, the cats have agreed to watch over stores of grain not in demeaning, despicable obedience to people foolish enough to believe themselves to be the cats' masters, but because the cats knew what rewards awaited them, that just and equitable remuneration was a part and parcel of the bargain they had struck.

That the owners of larders and granaries have since time immemorial persisted in their delusive belief that somehow cats are indentured slaves, is of little interest to the cats themselves. That cats should squander the precious hours of their lives in the ultimately futile endeavor of attempting to disabuse human beings of their profound misconceptions about the universe and their place in it has never been a preoccupation of cats' minds. They have bigger fish to fry.

The cat's position on all of these matters is perhaps best assimilated to that of Aristotle: although they benefit from all that they freely choose to do, cats do not refuse to act in ways which may be helpful to people, too. No, the cat succumbs to neither the victimology/slave morality trap diagnosed by Nietzsche nor the inane idea promulgated by certain deeply confused souls (and popularized by Ayn Rand) that acting in helpful, apparently “altruistic” ways is somehow morally wrong. No, the cat who catches mice and rats performs a useful function to others while he himself benefits as well.

So, too, does the cat who agrees to serve as a perfume tester in the home benefit through fulfilling this apparently selfless role. Stinky perfume is through the cat's beneficent intervention removed, bottle by bottle, from the abode, and he himself stands to gain the most from this improvement in air quality. Why? Because cats are olfactory geniuses, what no one who shares his home with a cat is in a position sincerely to deny.

How else to explain that my cat knows that I have opened a can of tuna or even a packet of dental treats located in a completely different room from where he may be taking an afternoon nap, even in a state of deep REM sleep? It's a fact: he detects scent-making molecules long before and in much lower concentration than any human being, with even the most sensitive or hyperosmic of noses.

Even more importantly, and rarely if ever heretofore acknowledged, no perfume is capable of tricking cat fur, which frustrates any attempts to fool naïve customers such as those who await in rapt attention the advice of a sales associate whose job it is specifically and obviously to sell perfumes, and who has been instructed, on pain of unemployment for failure to do so, to push certain products before others.

It is high time, my fellow perfumistas, that you welcomed a cat into your humble abode, should you as matters now stand be bereft of the same, not only as a way of introducing the divine light of felinity into the chambers of your soul, but also for this more practical reason: when it comes to perfume, your cat will never lead you astray.

The ancient Egyptians equated cats with gods, and they were not wrong. Cats have the superlative capacity to capture and convey the true beauty of olfactory masterpieces and to unmask all of the cheap pretenders, the bad frags only posing as perfume. You've been perfuming for awhile now, dabbling in expensive niche offerings here and there. Now you've reached a crossroads: do you want to continue to wallow in mere opinion and ignorance, or are you ready at long last to aspire to perfumic truth?

Isn't it about time
that you teamed up with a cat?

Tower of Babel 2, Duchamp and Art vs. Function, Beauty vs. Novelty

Is ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques

like Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine?

Etat Libre d'Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques is a polarizing perfume, to say the least. The first and most immediate problem of polarization is generated by the very fact that the people who like it do not seem even to smell the same perfume as those who detest it. This quite naturally raises the question of whether disagreements about perfumes more generally have more to do with our idiosyncratic physiological differences—our peculiar anosmias, hyposmias and hyperosmias—than with the ostensible objects of critique, the perfumes themselves. The problem is even further compounded by the effect of variable skin factors on how perfumes manifest themselves (see: The Myth of the Skin Chemistry Myth for more on this).

The confusion does not end there, however. In an eloquent comment on The Tower of Babel, Exhibit A, Gypsy Parfumista offered a very persuasive case for the claim that ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques can be coherently understood as a revolutionary work of conceptual art. Gypsy suggests, albeit in his own words, that this is precisely how we ought to understand Sécrétions Magnifiques:

As far as Secretions Magnifiques goes...*cracks knuckles* I have to confess that love it! I think the packaging is just what its creators wanted it to be: PROVOCATIVE! It provokes you to either (think you) hate it, because you find the art (or the actual scent) revolting, or love it (perhaps from the controversy and/or concept) before you even sniff it; or just want to own it to own it. ... I love the whole idea of what is actually exchanged when two people (regardless of gender) are intimate to be infinitely intriguing...and that someone DARED to make a perfume that attempts to capture that a feat of not only artistic vision but courage and a healthy sense of humor! … The thing about this perfume that made me think it was "artful" was that it took things no one ever dreamed of using in perfumery and united them with some interesting twists to come up with what some may be inclined to call the worst perfume in the world!

          —Gypsy Parfumista, January 9, 2012 (comments #15-19 at The Tower of Babel, Exhibit A)

I for one am willing to concede that, as much as I dislike Sécrétions Magnifiques as a perfume, it is indeed a successful piece of conceptual art. I do not, however, believe that it is one of the best perfumes ever created, far from it, in fact, and I certainly do not believe that, in blind trials, it would ever have been selected by any person knowledgeable of the history of perfume as one of the pinnacles of perfumic art.

The people who do not abhor the composition relay, as far as I've seen, rather banal experiences of it. In other words, even if one were to grant that persons anosmic or hyposmic to what are the revolting aspects of this perfume (to some wearers) are qualified to issue aesthetic judgments about the perfume as a perfume, it just seems far too pedestrian to qualify as high perfumic art, judging from the testimony of those who praise it.

That said, Sécrétions Magnifiques is something else. Upon reading Gypsy's words, I was immediately reminded of the case of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 submitted a urinal for exhibition at a museum, having christened his piece “Fontaine [Fountain]”, and sparked controversy and debate about the nature of art for decades to come. No one claimed that Duchamp was a great sculptor: he did not produce the urinal out of wet clay. But he was hailed as a great artist all the same.

Now those who are unimpressed with what ELdO has done in launching Sécrétions Magnifiques may dismiss it as a sort of prank or even provocation for the sake of provocation, and nothing like a great work of art. The same was said, of course, of Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine. In fact, it does not even matter very much whether or not everyone agrees about Sécrétions Magnifiques. The logic of the very question of its status is itself self-affirmatory. If everyone agreed, then there would be no controversy, and the perfume would have no value as a conceptual work of art. Again, no one agreed about Duchamp either. “Did he actually create anything?” was, I surmise, the most common skeptical question posed upon encountering Fontaine. Urinals are the most banal, ubiquitous, functional of things, used for the most unsavory of tasks, eliminating waste from the body. Can such an object be art?

What made Duchamp's Fontaine a work of art in the eyes of many was not that he had actually done anything artistic in the sense of brandishing a paintbrush or composing a piece of music or writing a poem—or producing a sculptured facsimile of a urinal. No, he took an object already in the world and decreed it to be “art”. The lack of skillful effort involved in this act was in fact an essential part of the revolutionary nature of his gesture.

One often hears remarks by unsophisticated visitors to modern art museums to the effect that I could have done that! When people scoff at works which are so simple that they could have made them—for example, a canvas painted with one uniform color—they are missing the entire point of Duchamp's act.

It seems to me that we should regard ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques in this way as well. In the case of Sécrétions Magnifiques, as in the case of Fontaine, it is not even necessary to come into direct content with the object of controversy. No, it is the nature of such conceptual artworks to generate and perpetuate controversy and debate. Thus the fact that some people refuse to give Sécrétions Magnifiques a sniff just constitutes more grist for the controversy mill.

In his quartet of comments, Gypsy Parfumista also made an admirable, if not entirely persuasive (to me!), attempt to defend the integrity of Sécrétions Magnifiques as a great perfume. I myself remain entirely unconvinced that persons who fail to perceive the repulsive aspects of the composition are qualified to judge it, just as I would never even think to ask a deaf person's opinion of a symphony. At best, in the most charitable of possible cases, one might be able to issue a relative judgment of the quality of the perfume, just as color blind persons may well have their own unique takes on paintings which to most of us feature vivid swaths of blue and green.

To reiterate: no one claimed that Fontaine was a great work of sculpture—it was not—and I do not believe that Sécrétions Magnifiques is a masterpiece of perfumery. I furthermore suspect that, in fact, it is not possible to be both a revolutionary conceptual work of art and a masterpiece in the classical/traditional sense. The categories seem to me mutually exclusive, so arguments for one are arguments against the other.

I also think that, notwithstanding Gypsy Parfumista's brilliant defense of ELdO as a conceptual work of art, the case of perfume, in particular, is quite a bit more complicated than that of visual art, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that there are some reigning and very fundamental confusions about the very nature of perfume in the first place. In order to subvert the concept of perfume à la Duchamp, one must first have a basic understanding and community agreement about what perfume itself is.

Duchamp wanted to say that he created a work of art out of a urinal by putting it on display and giving it a name. What would be an analogous gesture in the case of perfume? It seems to me that a far more revolutionary gesture than what ELdO did would be to launch a bottle of air! In fact, it might seem to some as though Escentric Molecules has come close (and a few other perfumers have followed suit with variations on their theme) by bottling very simple mixtures featuring as their focal note a single aromachemical.

Iso-E-super is the essence of Molecule 01, and ambroxan has been bottled under the name Molecule 02. Juliette Has a Gun has also launched a “version” of ambroxan, Not a perfume. In all of these cases, however, in contrast to that of ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, the primary polarization between supporters and detractors appears to revolve around not the question of the nature of the scent, but the question of whether buying such an aromachemical at a niche perfume price makes any sense.

The aromachemicals being bottled as prêt-à-porter, as it were, niche perfumes have pleasing aesthetic properties, which is why they have been selected for these projects. They are often incorporated as “boosters” of sorts to more complex compositions, and so are not generally reviled and are in fact familiar scents to people who wear and appreciate perfume.

Accordingly, on their face, the case of the one-note wonder aromachemical perfumes would seem to differ significantly from ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, because they are produced with the idea in mind that people really will want to wear them. And apparently they do: I saw at Aedes, for example, that Molecule 01 is one of their top sellers! The distinction between the case of a perfume produced as a provocative work of conceptual art—our example being ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques—and perfume produced in order to be appreciated and worn as perfume, leads us directly to the question of what, precisely, perfume is supposed to be.

Art vs. Function / Beauty vs. Novelty

While many perfumistas and perfumers may wish for the object of their obsession to be taken as seriously as the products of the seven established arts, certain factors peculiar to perfume and perfumery make the realization of this hope rather problematic, it seems to me. Perfume highlights age-old conflicts between Art and Functionality, on the one hand, and Beauty and Novelty, on the other.

The Tower of Babel is relevant here, in the first instance, because it really seems as though even knowledgeable people are often talking about different things in their reviews of perfume. The problem of disparate perception (selective hyposmia, anosmia, and hyperosmia), conjoined with the problem of variable skin chemistry, is thus triply compounded by the fact that people may have conflicting ideas about what precisely makes a good perfume good!

First off, it is obvious—and I frankly doubt that anyone would attempt to deny—that the vast majority of people purchase perfume for their personal use, in order to “consume” it themselves. I read in a fashion magazine last year that the number one reason why French women use perfume is to attract suitors. What? I thought to myself, recalling my relationship with a fellow who hated perfume more than just about anything else, including crime, war, and poverty. And yet, it appears, many women and men are using perfumes precisely in order to attract someone to them. They use perfume as a means to another end. Perfume is not, for these people, an end in itself.

Other people, such as myself, use perfume for personal pleasure, and I would be very, very surprised to learn of the existence of a single perfumista who did not also cite pleasure as a primary reason for collection (and obsessing) about perfume. Do we value perfume for perfume's sake? Can a perfume smelled by no one, one which is kept under inert gas and sniffed by no one, still be a great perfume? This seems very unclear to me and raises the whole question of the Osmothèque, which we'll be taking up as a separate salon topic in the not-too-distant future.

Now, there is a strain of perfumistas, at least judging by the contents of some of their reviews, who evaluate perfumes in terms of their novelty vis-à-vis what already exists in the world. So I often see people complaining that this or that perfume is a knock-off, a blatant copy, etc., of an already famous perfume.

I myself find it very unlikely that perfumers spend time acquiring samples of other perfumers' works and subjecting them to gas chromatographical analysis so that they can reproduce the same perfume. It just strikes me as incredibly implausible. Sure, maybe some of the industrial chemists at Unilever are doing that, but bona fide perfumers, who enjoy creating perfumes? Let's just say that I would be very, very surprised, if that were the case.

It seems far more likely to me that perfumers working in different places and times may sometimes generate similar-smelling perfumes because they have been acted upon by similar cultural forces, including exposure to a variety of trends. Lots of people have been producing sweet patchouli perfumes in recent years. Does this mean that they are trying to re-produce Angel? No, it means that the idea of a sweet patchouli composition has become an accepted conceptual category from which to commence the creation of a new fragrance.

All of this raises the question of Beauty versus Novelty. What are perfumers really aiming for? My distinct impression is that the vast majority of perfumers are attempting to make beautiful perfumes. Even if they are interested in creating original perfumes, beauty seems nearly always to be a constraining factor. Beautiful perfumes are a pleasure to wear and to smell, bringing us back to the importance of pleasure once again.

I imagine that niche perfumers (although that category is itself a contested one, see: The Question of Niche ) are aiming at both beauty and novelty. What are consumers paying for? It seems to me likely that most consumers are far more interested in beauty and wearability than in novelty. For one thing, the average perfume consumer is utterly ignorant of the vast majority of 16,000+ perfumes in existence. So, from the perspective of people with limited experience, every single fragrance which they try is likely to smell “new”, whether there exist a handful or five hundred other perfumes with very similar compositions and sensory effects.

This is, of course, why marketing campaigns become far more important than perfume quality in successful launches of mainstream perfumes. Most people have no resources by which to decide whether a perfume is great or not. They can say only that it smells good on them, having been lured in to buy it by an effective marketing campaign. Many people probably also receive perfumes as gifts for the very same reasons, but once they own them, they are likely to wear them, provided that it is possible to do so. Thus wearability becomes essential to successful mass market launches and companies such as Proctor & Gamble, which manufacture thousands of personal care products, are obviously aware of this fact, which therefore must serve as a fundamental constraint on any perfume which they launch.

These issues are not new. The truth is that people have been perfuming themselves for thousands of years, and yet, still today, perfumery has not been widely recognized as the huitième art. Why not? Is it because our intimate absorption or “ingestion” (through our cells) makes perfume appreciation a different sort of process than, say, visual art appreciation? Does this bring us back to the question of disparate reception caused by the physiological factors which make perfumes repulsive to some people while having the capacity to induce veritable olfactory ecstasy in others?

What say you, O Fragrant Friends?