On the Many Uses (none of which are abuses) of Perfume

Business as usual

Many different kinds of people use and produce perfume, and they do so for all different kinds of reasons. What percentage of people regard perfume as valuable in and of itself—beyond its functional value as a source of money or pleasure or as a tool of seduction? I wonder because even those who wish to exalt perfume to the status of art can achieve wealth and fame from doing so. Whether curators or perfumers, no one stands to lose by aligning perfume among the beaux arts. Or do they? Perhaps only consumers, the people who pay for perfume, should be wary of such initiatives, given the astronomical prices which fine art works command in today's capitalized art market.

Perfume is produced in order to be worn and because it is consumed. Bottles are drained, and they must be replaced, and this generates an enormous potential for profit on the part of those who seize the opportunity to promote perfume in any and every possible way. Each new development which casts perfume in a positive light will automatically generate an increase in sales. Drawing attention to perfume in any approbative way—for example, by calling it art—will make it coveted by an ever-expanding market niche. Art is good, so if perfume is art—in addition to offering a variety of functional benefits—all the better! Whether people regard perfumes as art objects or toiletries, the challenge for anyone attempting to profit from this industry remains how to woo consumers to spend a finite perfume wallet share—whether large or small—on one's own wares rather than those of competitors.

When a single company controls several houses, this goal becomes easier to achieve since a given customer may be persuaded to buy through a variety of different marketing techniques running alongside one another simultaneously. Conglomerate corporatization strengthens all of the houses under the aegis of a single company because it can absorb the shock of revenue troughs at some of the houses, so long as others in the same group are doing well. Independent houses, in contrast, must be more rugged and resilient to survive. A particularly bad year may result in a crippling insolvency, culminating in the need to shutter the store. Perhaps the recent phenomenon of proliferating niche houses under the direction of a single person or small group is a result of perfume makers' recognition that there really is “safety in numbers”.

Boadicea the Victorious and Illuminum, both British luxury lines, are the houses of Michael Boadi, a former hair stylist and self-taught perfumer. There is nothing wrong with those credentials, per se—they are precisely the same as those of Serge Lutens—and Boadi is certainly not the only creative director behind more than one house. Pierre Guillaume's ventures—Huitième Art, Parfumerie Générale, and Phaedon—leap to mind as another example of the same. A further case: Sospiro and XerJoff, two apparently distinct Italian luxury perfume houses, too, are linked. The people running these houses all seem to share an entrepreneurial spirit quite separate from their interest in perfume.

In addition to some niche houses sporing more houses with new names and concepts—or gimmicks—virtually all of them appear to be launching large numbers of new perfumes in a continuous stream, which can be understood as a counter-reaction to the corporate houses' penchant for flanker production. Perfumes used to be launched one at a time by professional perfumers, most of whom learned their trade in Grasse and many of whom were borne and bred by perfumers. The business of perfume has changed a great deal in the past few years, and part of this may be explained by considering parallel developments in the case of the wine industry.

Not so long ago, perfumery was primarily a family business, just as was the case in centuries past for wine making, concentrated primarily around the vineyards of France. Today, perfume houses are sprouting up all over the world, and many perfumers proudly display their lack of formal education as a badge of their independence and creativity. 

Similarly, in the aftermath of the California wine revolution, successful vineyards and producers can be found in countries quite far from France. Many celebrities, such as actor Gérard Depardieu and director Francis Ford Coppola, have started or become involved in wine ventures, despite having no obvious background or training in oenology.

In terms of consumption, too, perfumery appears today to be undergoing some of the same sorts of changes which were seen in the wine sector in the United States over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Today millions of Americans fashion themselves as wine connoisseurs as a direct result of the success of ingenious schemes to elevate the image of this particular type of alcoholic beverage, to which a sought-after prestige was attached, luring consumers in and away from beer and other spirits.

More alcohol per capita is undoubtedly consumed today in the United States as a result, but the proportions have also changed, for a person who is already drinking a glass of wine does not reach at the same time for a stein of beer. There is a culture peculiar to beer drinking, of course. It remains the beverage of choice for sporting events and college parties. But wine came to prominence as a result of its having been marketed to consumers in an epicurean light, while inviting ordinary, middle class people to lift stemware glasses up to their lips to imbibe.

The paradox of the wine revolution is that it was democratic, reaching ever further down the socioeconomic chain through the marketing of wine as a prestige beverage, the consumption of which would confer on people a sense of being somehow elite. The phenomenon of the wine club, whereby one is shipped regular “curated” selections of bottles being sold at an advantageous price—and often with free shipping—exemplifies this paradoxical democratization of wine connoisseurship.

The same curiously paradoxical dynamic seems to be working in the case of perfume, which has become democratized as well, through the very same seductive device, the sly suggestion that by entering into the world of perfume connoisseurs, one is joining the ranks of elites. People are drawn to consume what they have been persuaded to believe is sophisticated, and the same forces which brought about the wine revolution appear to be acting as well in the case of niche perfume.

The consumption logic of perfume is analogous to the one operating in the case of ingested alcohol solutions. Once one has selected one's scent of the day (affectionately referred to by perfumistas by its acronym, SOTD), the matter has been settled. The challenge for marketers is to persuade consumers to buy and apply their perfume first, before all of the many others which they might have selected instead.

The Perfumery Microcosm

Does perfume have a value independent of its identity as a commodified object? Is there any way to disentangle perfume as a “thing-in-itself” from the business nexus in which it is contained? The status of perfume seems quite confused above all because the producers of perfume themselves seem to vary so much, from those for whom perfume is the ultimate expression of creativity, to those for whom it is primarily—or solely—a very lucrative business. This is why it seems to me false to say that perfumery, in and of itself, is an art. To make such a sweeping, global claim is to indulge in falsificatory abstraction. The truth about perfume is not nearly so obvious and simple as we may wish for it to be, because people produce and use perfume for many different reasons. Are some of those reasons better than others? What is the force of that question? All of them—the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful—together conspire to create the complex world of perfumery, a microcosm of the larger world in which it is lodged.

Perfumes may all be liquids containing a variety of solvents and essences, but perfumery is not a single “thing in itself”. Perfumery is a multilayered, multifaceted network of people and practices, the end products of which are perfumes. In reality, many of the practices which lead to the production of perfumes bear no resemblance to the production of art by individual creators. When one attempts to speak of “perfumery” as a whole, one is bound to emit falsehoods, because the people whose industry results in perfume differ so much from one another in their intentions and values.

Perfumers themselves appear to cover a rather heterogeneous range. Perhaps some perfumers are truly olfactory artists, but most of them appear to be contracted designers or noses for hire. Certainly some artisan and truly independent perfumers would seem to fall into the former camp, at least initially, but their creative output is undoubtedly modified according to business constraints and exigencies. In one way of looking at art, there can be no “rules” whatsoever at the outset, so if a perfumer commences his or her work under the assumption that perfumes must be wearable, then the resultant creations would seem to be intrinsically functional products. This alone should suffice to demonstrate that such creators are designers, not artists, at least not in the strictest sense of that term.

Things in the world come in various colors, shapes and sizes. The world of perfumery, like the world more generally, contains artists, visionaries and hacks; entrepreneurs, shysters and cads. (How could it not?) Some houses maintain high compositional standards and seek out and use only the finest materials; others prefer to sell more bottles of less expensive perfume. Perfumery is conducted by perfumers, but also by CEOs, chemists, and accountants. Some of these people hold beauty to be of paramount value; others are concerned primarily—or only—with profit and may use marketing data and surveys to decide what to produce. The many fragrances created by this motley cast of characters range from masterpieces to disasters, although which are which appears to depend largely upon one's idiosyncratic tastes.

Is it a category mistake to claim that an unwearable perfume is a perfume? Or is it just a bad perfume? Do we know of any intrinsically unwearable perfumes? Or is the fact that a perfume exists to the extent that we are made aware of it not proof that someone, somewhere does wear it, and so it is not entirely unwearable? Does the survival of a perfume in the marketplace not prove that a perfume is a perfume, whether we happen to like it or not? We may denounce a fragrance as swill, but so long as someone else somewhere stills wears it, then it meets the minimal criterion needed to qualify as perfume.

Perfume users, like perfume producers, vary enormously from one case to the next. Some wear perfume in order to garner the attention—and favor—of other people. They may seek out perfumes which will augment their appeal to a prospective mate. They may wish to convey an image of glamour and sophistication, or to radiate facts about their lifestyle, as they do with their manner of dress. Other consumers wear perfume solely for themselves and may not even don it in public places precisely because they prefer not to attract the unwanted attention of strangers or to send out any signals at all.

In this regard, too, perfume use can be compared to wine and spirits consumption. Some people drink solely in order to get drunk. Whatever will accomplish that aim is fine: beer, cheap wine, hard liquor, even Everclear will do. Others drink fine wine to accompany cuisine and enhance their experience of a meal. Even everyday food can be elevated to some extent by being served with a delectable wine. Still others may drink wine in order to "decompress," for its psychological effects. The connoisseurs among connoisseurs regard wine as an object of transcendent aesthetic value. Many of today's self-styled connoisseurs may enjoy both the taste and the effects of their ingestion of wine. In reality, the list of reasons why people consume alcoholic beverages, including fine wine, goes on and on...

Niche perfumers may or may not be primarily interested in producing perfume as an expression of their creativity, although many perfumistas tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. Luxury niche seems pretty clearly to be a business-oriented approach to perfume. How to seduce consumers into believing that they should pay $200, $300, even $800 for a small bottle of consumable liquid? Why in the world, for example, should a bottle of simple vanilla perfume cost two hundred times more than the same volume of organic vanilla extract? Some of the creations of niche houses are quite good, while others are at best mediocre, but the emphasis among luxury niche firms appears to be on packaging and the cultivation of a house image. Let's put it this way: more effort, time and money appear to be poured into those aspects of the business than into the liquid inside the bottle, just as we learned about mainstream perfumes from “Behind the Spritz.”

One issue which might seem on its face to muddy the waters is the celebrity and glitz which has come to surround the business of perfumery, and especially exclusive, niche perfumery. Perhaps the latter, too, is a result of the inextricable link between ad campaigns and successfully mass-marketed perfumes. Image matters for not only designer but also niche perfumes, and the aura of exclusivity surrounding the latter undoubtedly contributes to the success of those who produce them. If a consumer is being asked to pay two or three or four or five times more for a perfume, there has to be some reason for that. There must be a pretext grounded in something. Hope springs eternal.

Christos at Memory of Scent recently raised the interesting question of quality. Are we willing to pay more for niche perfumes because they are of higher quality? Or do we simply assume that they must be of higher quality because they cost more? So many counterexamples leap to mind, of hyped niche perfumes which do not seem to be of high—or high enough—quality to warrant the exaggerated price, that we may safely conclude that, as much as we'd like it to be the case, it simply is not true that you get what you pay for. Or do you? What, exactly, is it that we are paying for when we buy a perfume?

Mixing Business with Pleasure: 
You Get What You Pay For

Confusions begin to arise in the case of perfume when the liquid is abstracted from the context. For consumers, it's all a package deal. Part of what we like is the scent, to be sure, but we also like the feeling of being associated somehow, in some way, with the images linked to that scent. The images may be of “beautiful” people, but they most certainly also include the whole aura of exclusivity surrounding niche perfume houses. We want to believe that we have refined tastes, that we are privy to olfactory secrets and wonders to which others have no or limited access.

All of this is the essence of luxury, and perfume is a luxury. To strip perfume of the complex marketing apparatus erected in order to sell it would be to remove the rich context which imbues creations such as Chanel no 5 with profound significance to countless consumers. Are they wrong to be seduced by the suggestion that they are as sexy as Marilyn Monroe or as glamorous as Carole Bouquet or Nicole Kidman when they don the perfume? Of course not. They are indulging in a fantasy made possible not by the smell alone but by the context in which it has been embedded, nurtured, and disseminated around the globe.

To remove the perfume from the bottle and abstract it from its marketing context is, in theory, possible. In reality, we can attempt to ignore marketing forces, but our efforts will ultimately be for naught. Why? Because the entire enterprise of perfumery is anchored in an image-based production mechanism. People do not buy perfumes solely on the basis of scent. Even those who think that they do cannot really abstract the scent from the cultural context which made perfume appreciation possible for them in the first place.

No matter how assiduously we may attempt to abstract the scent and to pull it conceptually out of its packaging, in the back of our minds, our origins in perfume appreciation will always remain. No matter how sophisticated we may become in our knowledge and understanding of perfume as a “thing in itself”, each and every one of us began as the unsophisticated consumer at the counter. It's the only entrance possible to the world of perfume for anyone, in principle.

We may wish to kick the ladder away, to use Ludwig Wittgenstein's metaphor, but in reality we cannot. To persuade oneself to believe that we can is to succumb to self delusion. If one orders a sample set from MinNewYork or Aedes, and then sets out to test the samples blind, one will still know, in the back of one's mind, where the perfumes came from: niche emporia. The prestige is inextricably present even when the liquid in the vial is tested without reading the label.

Perfume bottle collectors who focus on the vessel in which perfume is housed, like perfume lovers who would strip perfume of its packaging, view the bottle from a somewhat skewed perspective. The bottles can of course be regarded as objets d'art (or, rather, design) in their own right, alongside other kinds of bottles—those used for milk, beer, etc.—but their significance derives in part from having been anchored in the complex luxury perfume nexus.

A glass bottle is infinitely more valuable when it is filled with a precious elixir which excites the senses and may induce a flood of memories in the wearer. We perceive solid glass objects with our eyes and through our sense of touch. We perceive perfume through our nose. Why should one or the other of these modes of perception be more important than the other? Designers create bottles, and designers create perfume. We can love and appreciate each, but our enjoyment of both will be enhanced by keeping them together, as they were produced, in a package devised precisely in order to lure us in and fill us with delight to the point that we become willing to buy.

The pleasure of perfume derives in part from the fantasies which arise and are made possible by the luxury context in which perfume is inextricably fixed. Going against what seems to be the orthodox view, I have come to be skeptical of the idea that we are somehow harmed or tricked by the barrage of images associated with the perfumes which we may eventually acquire. We will be seduced in determining how to dispense with our wallet share, one way or the other. Whether we are wooed by pictures of Brad Pitt and Audrey Tautou, and historical images of Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve, or the scent of jasmine, rose, and strong aldehydes which make up the composition of Chanel no 5, matters not in the least to those who are trying to sell the perfume.

The only criterion, at the end of the day, is pleasure. If we derive pleasure from donning the perfume, then we have not been swindled at all. We got what we paid for: an image, a scent, a feeling of satisfaction, the sense of of being somehow more sexy and glamorous, a flood of memories induced by our perfume. Why should one of these be more valuable than any of the rest? Images, like bottles, may enhance our experience by adding a rich layer of fantasy to our encounter with the perfume. Is it wrong to wish to be glamorous and sexy or to believe that by wearing a perfume we become more so? Seems rather harmless to me.

The same should be said, of course, for those who find a deeper satisfaction in wearing a perfume because someone somewhere has decreed it to be a masterpiece. Should we care what they think? Probably not, if perfume reception is ultimately a matter of taste, as it seems to be. Nonetheless, the experience of some wearers will indeed be enhanced by having come to believe that they share the refined taste of experts, whoever they may be, and no matter how that label came to be applied, even if “the experts” have been self-decreed.

Witness, again, what happened in the realm of wine. Robert Parker essentially appointed himself the Tzar of taste, and because people clamored to be like him, red wines became denser and more like Merlot, while white wines cured in oak barrels became all the rage. It's a fact: people desire to be like the experts, to share their presumably superior taste, and that is why exalting best-selling perfumes as masterpieces, too, is a clever marketing scheme. It ends by enhancing the sense of luxury associated with wearing the perfumes thus showcased.

A House of Mirrors

Chanel no 5 was marketed into women's—and men's—brains as being sexy and seductive and, above all, glamorous. Was it worn by glamorous women because Chanel no 5 was glamorous? Or did Chanel no 5 become glamorous because women—and men—came to associate images of celebrities in slinky black dresses with the scent of the perfume? Did Marilyn Monroe wear Chanel no 5 because it was sexy? Or did Chanel no 5 come to seem sexy because sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe were known to wear it?

To see why the packaging (including marketing images) and the perfume are inextricably connected and cannot be divorced from one another without transforming the thing thus abstracted, consider what perfume would be to someone who did not come to it through the usual path, by visiting a cosmetic counter at a department store. To someone coming to planet earth from a galaxy far away, I am quite sure that Chanel no 5 would be a smell with zero significance, whether sexual or socioeconomic or artistic or otherwise. Certainly the white sheets of the orphanage where little Coco was raised and the white steppes of Siberia where the perfumer who composed the perfume spent a good deal of time would not be images easily connected to the scent of aldehydes by a newcomer to our planet. Would the perfume seem sexy or glamorous without being presented simultaneously with images of sexy and glamorous women? Evidently not. It would be only a smell.

Indeed, even right here on planet earth there appear to be a fair number of young people who associate the scent of Chanel no 5 not with Marilyn Monroe or Catherine Deneuve but with “the mad old cat lady”. I recently read a string of comments to that effect in response to a piece on the Brad Pitt Chanel no 5 campaign. Those who wrote comments did not seem to “get” the iconic perfume. Or, rather, what they got was that the scent evokes images of something which they would never want to be.

I've seen similar remarks made about such perfumes as Guerlain Shalimar and L'Heure Bleue, reportedly favorites among senescent women in retirement homes. My own view is that Guerlain screwed up rather royally by mass-marketing Shalimar at drugstores and discounters and basically any- and everywhere. Rumor has it that various “levels” of Guerlain's most famous creations are circulating about—not just a case of reformulation, but formulations tweaked—and made more cheap—for specific markets. This sends very mixed messages. When the cleaning lady wears Shalimar as her signature scent, then the woman for whom she works may think twice before donning it herself. Luxury is essentially elitist, and perfume is a luxury product. In order for the illusion to continue to work on prospective consumers, there must be a division between those who have access and those who do not. Without insiders and outsiders, the notion of luxury is evacuated of sense.

In the twenty-first century, we seem to be living in the age of democratization of everything, including perfume. Since there are no true experts on taste in perfume, everyone is suddenly an expert. The fragrance community websites are frequented by their share of snobs, but also Jill Q. and Joe Q. mainstream fragrance consumers, who buy on the basis of ads and may evaluate a perfume more on visual associations and packaging than on the composition itself. Or perhaps we all do that? No one seems to know. Everyone has opinions, and no one is afraid to express them, and enthusiasm is taken to be the necessary and sufficient condition for sound perfume evaluation. Which brings us back to the question of the many uses of perfume.

It seems quite clear that people wear perfume for the pleasure which they derive from doing so, but the sources of their pleasure vary. In some cases, compliments garnered from others compound whatever pleasure the wearer may enjoy through smelling the scent. Still, surely no one wears perfumes which they themselves find to be ugly—except in testing scenarios where they are attempting to wait out the disappearance of what they take to be a bad perfume.

With the globalization of media and the spread of images from first world industrialized countries to even the farthest reaches of the globe, more and more people have become exposed to mass-marketed fragrance, if only through the advertisements created in order to sell it. A homogenization of culture is inevitable given the power of capitalism-generated media images to seduce potential consumers, as objects once nonexistent from a person's perspective suddenly come into view and then become coveted. We need more and more things, including perfumes, because increasingly we are made to feel that our life is incomplete without them.

With the advent of online fragrance community websites, perfumistas have been able to connect with fellow perfume lovers and mutually fertilize their passion through penning reviews and participating in forums about every conceivable topic related to the object of their olfactory fascination. Above all, it has become possible learn about the latest—and presumably greatest—offerings from our favorite perfume houses, in addition to the birth of brand new houses with vast collections to tempt us. Do we need any of this? No. All of this is a luxury in which we indulge with the free time and money which we are fortunate enough to be able to enjoy, unlike the vast majority of people in the world, past, present, and future.

Perfume, the liquid, is microcosmic of perfumery, the enterprise. Why? Because it comprises a complex nexus of components or factors only some of which are relevant to any given person. We literally smell different aspects of perfumes to different degrees, just as all of the motivations giving rise to perfumery are found to varying extents among the various participants, from producer to purveyor to consumer. Perfume as such reflects the means of its production: a multifaceted crystal which evades all efforts to capture it in short, simplistic and categorical ways. Whatever we may attempt to say about perfume will be false from the purview of some, while nonetheless true, if only from our evanescent and limited glimpse—until we blink.

The Toiletries Trap—or is it a safe haven?

Arts and Crafts and the Status of Perfume

The status of perfume continues to be debated, but it seems that the reigning climate these days is inclining people to join the “perfume is art” camp. There are many possible sociological, economic, and psychological explanations for this phenomenon relating specifically to this moment in history, but the question whether perfumery is really an art may be but one iteration of an age-old dispute regarding the distinction—or lack thereof—between arts and crafts. Is an accomplished potter an artist or a craftsman? What about a gourmet chef?

Is a genuine object of art essentially useless, serving no mundane function? Does an artist whose medium is clay become a mere craftsman on the days when she produces bowls and mugs? Should what she does be judged by appeal to what other people may or may not do with her creations? If she drills holes in the bottom of her mugs, making it impossible to use them for the purpose for which they appear to be intended, then will this act—senseless to some—elevate her, the creator, to the status of artist? Or will she just be a bad (mad!) potter?

The genre fiction writer offers another useful example for reflection. Authors of detective and mystery, science fiction, and romance novels are producing books which fit into certain predelineated categories and which follow certain basic conventions. 

The readers of such works have a set of expectations which must be met in order for the work to succeed. A mystery novel without any suspense is a failure because being suspenseful is essential to being a good mystery novel. A romance novel with no hot and steamy scenes of love and betrayal would be a flop. A science fiction novel which made no reference to the current state of technology and possible future developments would crash like a rocket with a faulty O-ring.

The Toiletries Take

To many, indeed most, consumers, perfume is a toiletry. Perfumistas have been known to bristle at the suggestion that the object of their olfactory love might be anything less than the most exquisite work of art. Nonetheless, like it or not, perfume is regarded by many people as a toiletry because it is a consumable product just like soap, lotion, and toothpaste. 

Such products all serve functions and offer certain very specific benefits to the user.

People generally perfume themselves in order to smell good. Often the goal is to smell attractive to other people. Some wearers, at least judging by comments in fragrance community website forums, appear to care more about others' receptions of their perfume than they do about their own perceptions of their own scent. 

Whether those who perfume themselves care more about their own opinions' or the opinions of those with whom they come in contact while wearing perfume, they appear to be united in their commitment to the idea so often recited in perfume reviews, that Perfume should smell good. From this perspective, if a perfume does not smell good, then it is either a bad perfume, or it is not perfume at all because it is unwearable.

Bad poetry has its own name: doggerel. Bad perfume is sometimes referred to as swill or dreck. Bad food is slop, but food which cannot even in principle be consumed is really garbage in disguise. In this way, perfumery is obviously similar to cuisine. A meal, no matter how painstakingly prepared by a chef, must be edible, in the end. If it is utterly inedible, because it is repulsive or poisonous, then the chef has failed. Food should taste good, and perfume should smell good. Does this not imply that niche perfumery is completely analogous to haute cuisine? Blasphemy of all blasphemies...

Consumable Crafts

Unlike most other crafts, cooking and perfumery are united by the fact that the products of the craft are consumed. We might consider wine in the same group and place oenology on an equal footing with other crafts the ultimate objective of which is to produce consumable goods. The artisan may and often does aim to produce fine, excellent, beautiful, even transcendent goods, but they must, at the end of the day, be consumable all the same.

What I find especially interesting about these crafts is not just that the goods produced are consumed, it is that the goods must be consumed in order to be experienced. Perfume appreciation, like fine wine and cuisine appreciation involves destroying the very object of appreciation through an act of ingestion. There is no point to food which is not eaten or wine which sits in a cellar never to be imbibed. Similarly, perfume in a capped bottle may hold potential for appreciation, but it is not truly appreciated for what it is, the unique combination of notes which unfurl before the nose, until it is sprayed.

This is, in part, it seems to me, the basis for the claim sometimes made that large perfume collections are ridiculous. If the person who owns hundreds—or even thousands—of perfumes cannot even in principle wear them all, then is she really any different from the notorious hoarder, who amasses and clings to objects in a desperate attempt to create meaning from an otherwise meaningless existence?

Perhaps we can think about large perfume collections in a more charitable light. Perhaps what they reflect is a desire—widely shared by perfumistas today, or so it seems—that we should be able to have our perfume and sniff it too, so to speak. This would seem to be the guiding idea behind the Osmothèque, an institution established in order to preserve perfume which however, in reality, can only be experienced through its very annihilation.

My distinct impression is that most people, even sophisticated perfumistas, have not really thought through the very many different kinds of judgments which they make regarding perfumes. The term 'art' has been appropriated to express approval, without any real examination of what it could mean for perfumery to be an art. It is unclear in what aesthetic principles of judgment applicable to perfumery might consist. People appear to judge perfumes solely by appeal to their own idiosyncratic tastes. Are there principles of perfume criticism? No one has yet to make the case. We can of course use language in any way we like and, yes, we may express our approval of a perfume labeling it a masterpiece or a chef d'oeuvre. But that just seems to be code for: “I love it!”

Certain nagging contradictions need to be addressed, if we are to get to the bottom of this question, it seems to me. On the one hand, many perfumistas seem to want to exalt perfume to the status of an eternal, immortal art. Most notably, in his Untitled series, Chandler Burr has been exhorting people to smell perfume as an art object. A sentence from one of his introductory texts at OpenSky reads: For the first time, experience perfumes in a way that will allow — in fact encourage — you to rethink each scent by freeing you from all visual cues and marketing techniques.

Burr appears to be addressing the unwashed masses most of whom have never participated in the sorts of Mystery Scent Vial Trials which have been hosted by perfumistas for years now. But even people who sample perfumes from vials, independently of the bottles, have already been experiencing perfume as perfume, not as marketing hype. 

To be perfectly frank (quoi d'autre?), it is not at all clear to me what smelling perfume as a work of art is actually supposed to mean. Does smelling a perfume differ from smelling a perfume under the label objet d'art? In what might the allegedly distinct experiences inhere? Both would seem to involve ingesting molecules through the nose which transmit messages to the brain. How does calling a perfume a “work of art” change any of that?

Another problem with such an idea is that perfume is the only example of an alleged art which leaves no traces of itself behind having once been experienced. We must first purchase perfume for our personal consumption before we are able to appreciate it—whether as an objet d'art or something rather more mundane, to wit: a toiletry. Because it must be acquired and destroyed to be appreciated, perfume is essentially commodified.

Of Rules and Shopping Carts

Further evidence for the craft status of perfumery may be found in considering the complacent adherence by perfumers to the IFRA regulations restricting the use of certain materials. Perfumers appear, by and large, to be abiding by these regulations or guidelines. But since when did artists follow the rules? The attitude of perfumers themselves toward the IFRA, their willingness to line up in a row even as this severely restrains their own creative potential, suggests that perfumery is not really an art, at least not as practiced by the vast majority of professional perfumers today. Olfactory art is possible because any kind of art is possible, but perfumers do not, for the most part, seem to be engaged in that enterprise. Most of them are, instead, “noses for hire”.

Successful professional perfumers such as Alberto Morillas and Yann Vasnier secure contracts with a variety of different houses because they can be depended upon to create perfumes which consumers will wish to wear and, by extension, buy. Of course, the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for successful chefs. They are not hired by restaurants unless they have demonstrated their dependability at producing pleasing food which patrons will want to consume. The similarity of the vocation of successful perfumers and chefs suggests, then, that whatever one wishes to call what these professionals do, that label—art or craft—should apply to both cases.

It is worth underscoring here that the Untitled Series being “curated” by Chandler Burr is being carried out under the auspices of the social shopping site OpenSky. The scare quotes are intended. The word 'curated' has become fashionable of late and is now applied to any collection of just about any goods being offered up for sale. I recently received an advertisement from Henri Bendel touting the virtues of its “curated” gourmet snack collection!

The mission of OpenSky, like that of Henri Bendel, is clearly to get people to consume more and more random things as quickly as possible. Nothing else can be reasonably inferred from the frequency of their emails to me in an incessant campaign to get me to buy n'importe quoi, above all, whatever I may have been looking at most recently. If I only browse and do not buy something from OpenSky but make the mistake of placing some item in my cart (to avoid wasting time at the only shopping site I've seen which actually lacks a search button—at least as of today), then I am rewarded with stalking messages until such time as I either buy the item or purge it from my cart.

Once my cart is empty, then I am enticed to return to OpenSky to fill it with more random objects recommended by my “friends” Bobbie Flay, Ming Tsai, Chandler Burr, and anyone else whom I've “shopped with” before. Every so often I am sent a “free shipping day” message, and I also seem to be regularly rewarded for my reticence in closing out deals with “credits” of various amounts, which lately have ceased to be applicable to clearance items and now only apply to purchases of at least $50.

Perfume is a commodity, which Chandler Burr is attempting to sell at the same time that he wishes to exalt perfumery to the status of an art. Many perfumistas appear to have jumped on the Burr bandwagon—which is not to say that this whole movement was his own idea, for it was not—but they also want to consume the perfume paid for with their hard-earned cash. Even more striking, they want to have their perfume—as an art—while retaining the ability to consume it on the cheap, applying pricing standards appropriate to toiletries in deciding whether a perfume is worth its price tag or not.

Fine Art at Toiletries Prices? 
Wake Up and Smell the Chemical Soup!

In an earlier manifesto relating to this topic, PERFUME IS NOT MILK, I pointed out that perfume is an affordable luxury or self-indulgence to anyone well-off enough to dine out, drink wine, or to drive a car where that is manifestly not a necessity (as in a city with an excellent public transportation system). Following upon a feisty exchange with Kankuro (of Parfumo fame) over at Fragrantica, I would like to approach the economic question from another angle. My answer, you may rest assured, will remain the same—not because I am a dogmatist, but because my opinion has yet to change!

I have been struck recently by the importance of this question all the more as I have attempted to wrestle with the question of whether or not perfume is an art. As we have seen, there are good reasons for skepticism about the status of perfumery as one of the beaux arts, but I would like to consider what the likely consequences of a widespread affirmation of perfume as an art form would be. Specifically, what would the economic effect be?

As a preamble, let us consider again the somewhat alarming revelations of the Daily Finance article “Behind the Spritz,” in which the breakdown of the cost of a $100 MSRP bottle of perfume is displayed. On first read, it is mindboggling to discover that the perfume itself accounts for only 2% of the cost of an average massmarketed designer perfume. The article no doubt incensed many perfume lovers, confirming yet again in their mind that the price being asked for by houses is far too high.

I'd liked to dig a bit more deeply into this issue. First off, the assumption being made in the article and by anyone who is troubled by its revelations, is that the price of a good should be more or less the same as the combined price of its constituent components, plus perhaps a small profit margin to those who peddle the product. It seems like common sense.

Let us take a simple example. No one really thinks that a pizza should cost the sum of the cost of flour + yeast + tomatoes + cheese + oregano + olive oil + the heat needed to cook it. If that is what a pizza cost, its price would be something like $1. Add some sausage or anchovies, and maybe it would cost $2. Instead, pizzas cost ten times that much. Part of that price difference is due to the cost of labor to produce the pizza.

Somebody had to harvest the wheat to make flour, to mix with yeast and water, to knead and punch dough, to roll or throw it out to form a disc, to adorn the dough and to convey it into an oven for it to bake. Someone else had to grow the tomatoes, chop them up, transform them into pizza sauce. Yet another chain of persons was needed to milk the cow, to make the cheese, to catch the anchovies, etc. In fact, the costs involved in each of these separate chains to the production of the various components of a pizza is already embedded in the cost of the end product of that chain. So if wheat flour costs $1 for a pound, that price already includes the cost of producing it, along with the profits enjoyed by the various persons employed within the chain.

If one were to produce all of the components of a pizza from scratch—don't try this at home!—that would be another matter altogether and an exercise which would swiftly demonstrate the virtue of the divisions of labor which have arisen in the modern world. Once one reflects upon the chain of labor involved in the production of a pizza, its price no longer seems exorbitant at all. Restaurants buy their basic ingredients in bulk at a significantly lower cost than the volumes typically used by individual consumers. Consequently, to make a pizza at home, which would require first purchasing all of the separate ingredients, would probably cost quite a bit more than the finished pizza parlor product itself—even without the (paltry) wages paid to the restaurant workers.

Turning now to the case of perfume, the consternation over the cost breakdown of a bottle of perfume arises because the aspects of the perfume which we truly value account for the smallest portion of its price. Everything else, much of it extraneous—or so it seems—costs more. Even the bottle, at an average of $6, costs three times more than the juice inside, at $2. On its face, then, the case of perfume seems rather different than that of pizza. True, some pizza parlors do advertise, but many do not—or at least not in the way that Chanel and Dior do—and we are confident that most of the money which we pay for a pizza covers the cost of the pizza itself, not its box!

The concerns raised in “Behind the Spritz” are precisely why people have decried the price of perfume, and often complain about it in their reviews. But what, my fragrant friends, is the cost of anything—and why? Why does a professional baseball player earn millions of dollars a year for donning a costume, hitting a fast-moving ball with a stick, and running around a parallelogram as fast as he can? And why in the world do people pay hundreds of dollars for their families to be able to sit in the stands and watch him do that? For heaven's sake, they could be spending that money on some very fine perfume!

In some cases, a vast disparity arises because the objects in question have an emergent value, which far transcends the value of their material components. Consider a painting by any famous dead artist. Obviously, the cost of the canvas + paint + labor does not add up to the millions of dollars which such a work may command at Sotheby's.

When perfume reviewers complain that they would never pay so much for this, they mean a type of perfume which can be had for a much lower price. We perfumistas demand a lot of the perfumes said to be worthy of our wallet share. We want beautiful and original compositions which wear well and have excellent longevity and which will not spoil before we reach the bottom of the bottle. Many people also want all of this on the cheap. They seem truly to expect original masterpiece perfumes at knock-off prices.

I myself believe that the originality requirement has been grossly overstated and thoughtlessly applied in the case of perfume. Perhaps this is in part a result of the rampant charges of plagiarism made through The Holey [sic] Book. Many reviews by perfumistas seem keen to dismiss as redundant perfumes whose sole demerit is to have reminded the wearer of another perfume created earlier—and often with a lower price tag. To call a perfume a “clone” or a “knock-off” is to allege a conscious act of plagiarism on the part of the perfumer who created it.

I do not understand nor have I ever understood, first, why people derive such a sense of smug satisfaction through leveling such (fully unsubstantiated!) charges, nor, second, why this slander/libel has not been recognized for what it is by nearly anyone—save sherapop—to date. Instead, this condemnation of the efforts of hard-working, well-meaning perfumers continues in a spate unlikely to abate until The Holey [sic] Book is so badly out of date that people stop turning to it at all.

The strident tone and fervor with which this perfume is denounced as a clone of that one, far from establishing the validity of the charge, diminishes the reviewer, not the perfumer, in my mind. How many Beyond Paradise clones exist? Let us count the number of entries in which this manifestly preposterous assertion is made about perfumes which really smell nothing like Beyond Paradise at all! (Marc Jacobs Essence? Really?)

A Modest Proposal

The irony of the knock-off and clone complaints by perfumistas is that often some of the very same people complain from the left side of their mouth that perfume is too expensive and, from the right side of their mouth, that perfume has not been adequately recognized for the art that it is. In reality, the reason why perfume remains affordable, and is by far the least expensive among all luxury products, is precisely and only because the vast majority of consumers regard it as a lowly toiletry.

We may wish to duly acknowledge the greatness of transcendent perfumes, but we'll be much better off if we keep the artistic quality of our cherished elixirs a closely guarded secret among fragrant friends! When was the last time that an art collector picked up a masterpiece for $100 or $200 or even $300? If the word gets out that niche perfume is really art, then the market price will skyrocket and all middle class perfumistas will suffer as a result.

This argument against exalting perfumery as an art is diaphanously pragmatic and self-serving. But I wonder whether those who insist on characterizing perfumers as artists and perfumery as an art have ever thought this matter through and entertained what the consequences would be, were they to succeed in exalting perfume above the (other) toiletries. I recently read a review in which the author expressed “deep regret” at having shelled out all of $15 for several perfume samples from a house whose wares were not to her liking. Need I say more?

When was the last time, O Gently Scented Reader, that you picked up a painting at Sotheby's—or even drained a bottle of vintage wine? My Fragrant Friends, I humbly enjoin you to abandon your vain and self-sabotaging insistence on labeling perfumery as one of the arts, for we will only be able to continue to have our perfume and sniff it too so long as the secret doesn't get out!

The Question of Tea: TGFOP Perfume Testing?

One feature of perfume which makes it difficult to compare to the beaux arts is that it is consumed and cannot be recaptured once it has dissipated into the cosmos. Attempts to immortalize perfume seem for this reason in some ways confused and ultimately doomed. Perfumes are born through the industry of perfumers and are introduced to us by houses, but unlike a piece of music or literature, a perfume is bound to come to an end, sooner or later, by its very nature. 

Perfumes change over time in a way that musical compositions and poems do not. Yes, such works will be interpreted variously by different people at different periods of time, determined in part by the peculiar cultural milieu in which they live, but the score or the text remains the same.

A great poem or piece of music may be discovered where it was left in a drawer by its author decades or even centuries after it was composed, but a bespoke perfume forgotten in a closet would no longer exist by the time its bottle was found after the same period of time. Having been created and produced by finite human beings out of equally exhaustible materials, every perfume will eventually meet with its own demise.

The well-meaning, if naïve, intention of those who conceived of the Osmothèque was to elevate perfumery to the status of poetry, music, and the other beaux arts. It is true that any art form which involves natural materials will eventually decompose—paintings, sculptures, architectural structures, … —but perfume is far more evanescent than all of the rest, being made of highly volatile molecules which will immediately evaporate if the bottle in which it is housed is left uncapped, and eventually decompose, even if the bottle is tightly sealed. Storing perfumes under argon gas may help to postpone the inevitable, but such a measure does not make the ultimate fate of a perfume any less inexorable.

Some perfumes' lifetimes are longer than others, but none is very long compared to the works of music and literature which have stood the test of time, and it requires a continuous, concerted effort on the part of someone somewhere to keep perfumes alive (in production). Like periodical publications—currently in crisis (no doubt to the great relief of trees everywhere)—a perfume requires a vigilant support system in order to persist.

Many magazines have folded in recent years due to insolvency. Even magazines with devoted readerships may abruptly shutter their offices when funding is suddenly withdrawn for no better reason than that the benefactors or producers have lost interest and decided to redirect their energy and financial support to other projects. The texts may of course be archived, but the magazine, as a thing in reality, ceases to exist, just as the leaves of a tree deprived of water will shrivel and dry, and ultimately die.

Perfumes, too, require a benefactor of sorts: a house willing to do what it takes to keep the perfume in production. In recent times, as small houses have been absorbed by large corporate conglomerates such as LVMH, Estée Lauder, and Procter & Gamble, the fate of a given perfume has come to have more to do with whether it makes business sense to maintain it than whether the creation has intrinsic aesthetic worth. One might have thought that no one could be so obtuse as to refuse to continue to produce a widely acclaimed perfume, one touted as a masterpiece, and yet this has happened and will no doubt continue to happen, perhaps with even greater frequency as corporations continue to expand, cordoning off more and more of perfume land.

The trend these days appears to be to focus more on heavily advertised mass market fragrances which sell not for their composition but for the appealing images which are tied to the products. The profligate production of flankers is best explained by the fact that they provide companies with a head start on marketing, being parasitic as they are on the namesake perfume and the images used to promote it. True, the visual images used in advertising perfumes are independent of the perfumes themselves, but through image-based marketing campaigns, consumers are persuaded to part with relatively large sums of money for even mediocre juice. Consumers are, in effect, paying more for the advertisements than they are for their perfume.

In the end, perfume is consumed, so the goal of marketers is to get people to buy a bottle, after which, if it is at all wearable, then the perfume will be used. This situation is similar to that depicted in Mondovino regarding wine. Once people have purchased a case of wine, then they will drink it, provided that it is potable.

In the case of perfume, having spritzed through a good 100ml, the wearer may find that it has become a part of his or her perfumed identity, and he or she may well purchase the same perfume again. Signature scents become signature scents through a process of habituation. As with wine, a certain type of perfume may be an acquired taste, but because human beings are naturally habit-forming creatures, our preferences can be molded by tastemakers who decree what we should wear or drink and persuade us to agree.

Why do people drink wine, and why do they drink tea?

While thinking about the tastemakers in Mondovino and the tastemakers in the world of perfume, it occurred to me that perfume use seems closer to tea than to wine when it comes down to actually consuming it. Why is that? Because tea and perfume do not alter one's state of mind in any debilitating way. There is no loss of lucidity in overimbibing tea or overapplying perfume.

In contrast, when one overindulges in wine, the price paid is a rapid loss of acuity, what can range from tipsiness and a slightly blurred or skewed vision of reality to the complete loss of consciousness. Some people handle alcohol better than others—one glass may enough to induce a drunken slur in some while others can single-handedly empty entire bottles—but everyone has a point beyond which they are no longer in complete control. That state of drunkenness—beyond which one is not permitted legally to drive—is not achieved through the use of perfume or tea alone. Indeed, caffeinated tea may well sharpen rather than dulling one's senses and wits.

I had a professor a while back (in California) who told me that he thought that wine connoisseurs were a bunch of alcoholics. I think that he was probably overgeneralizing, but surely there are some wine connoisseurs who are alcoholics, and certainly many people appreciate wine more for its effects on their mind than for the lingering taste on their palate. Or do they separate these two effects at all?

One might argue that a big part of the experience of tea, too, has to do with its felicitous provision of a source of caffeine, and that many tea drinkers imbibe their beverage of choice in part for the mental effects which they can expect to derive from doing so. True, there are people who drink only herbal infusions and decaffeinated teas, but many tea drinkers really do prefer good old stout black tea or a bracing cup of green, which strikes a balance between herbal and black, providing a medium-sized dose of caffeine.

Tea drinkers often have very specific loves and likes, and some of them are familiar with the many fine grades of darjeeling and assam, to say nothing of the thousands of other varieties of tea available on the market today. Still, I suspect that for many such tea drinkers, part of the joy of drinking tea is indeed the joy of achieving a state of caffeination—or recaffeination when it is consumed later in the day.

I recall asking at one point an Irish fellow what sorts of teas were found in Irish Breakfast blend, and he confidently (and endearingly) replied, “Black.” This is where most tea drinkers are found, among the teeming masses of people who think that “black tea” refers to a single thing in the universe. Green tea has recently come to be recognized as well, thanks to the aggressive marketing of it as a source of “antioxidants” said to stave off cancer, but here, too, the vast majority of people could not offer any help whatsoever if asked to describe the difference between gunpowder and sencha. Like George W. Bush, who once confused Sweden with Switzerland, most people could not even name the countries of origin of those two very different varieties of green tea.

My impression is that the vast majority of tea drinkers are of the unsophisticated variety, the millions of people who think that iced tea tastes only like the liquid produced using Lipton's instant iced tea powder, and many of whom believe that orange pekoe is a flavor of black tea (not a size of cut tea leaves). I would venture to guess that most people do in fact drink tea as a source of refreshment with enough caffeine to reinvigorate. They are not looking at tea for its aesthetic properties but for its functional benefits.

I may as well confess here that I happen to be a caffeine addict (or has it been obvious all along?), and so although I can accurately answer all of the above questions and many more, my development of an interest in tea was tied up with my need to ingest enough caffeine to make it through the second half of the day. At one point I was becoming very involved in tea drinking, learning what the acronyms TGF BOP1—(Tippy Golden Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe 1), CTC (Crush Tear Curl), and FTGFOP and all of the other arcane designations mean, and even writing reviews at one site—until I discovered that my negative reviews were deleted, at which point I stopped.

I was delighted to find that tea forms a lively subculture in Western society, and began ordering all sorts of varieties of black and green teas from all over the world, brought together for me felicitously by my favorite tea emporium. During my journey through the world of tea, I discovered that certain varieties work very well for me and taste delicious, while others are far less appealing.

I cannot drink oolong or jasmine teas, for example. Sadly, they induce in me a sort of gag reflex, not unlike my reaction to the sight or smell of canned spinach, or of rum and Coke. I'd love to know which chemicals in these teas—or which proportions—push me over the edge so as to have this effect on me, but in the end it does not really matter. Given the choice of a strong black assam, a grassy darjeeling or a flowery oolong, my choice will always be one of the first two and never, ever the third.

Could I develop a tolerance—and even a taste—for oolong and jasmine teas? I'm skeptical, to say the least, because the experience of drinking those varieties is so very unpleasant to me that I cannot imagine picking up the habit. Perhaps if I tricked myself by slowly mixing larger and larger portions of oolong with a darjeeling, I could reach the point where I was drinking 100% oolong. This very method is recommended to pet owners when changing from one to another dry food rejected by their beloved furry friend: mix a small amount in and keep increasing that amount until finally, at long last, the new food tastes like the right food and will be gobbled up as though it had never been changed.

In any case, to return to the ostensible topic of this post, the parallels between the world of tea and the world of perfume seem to me to be virtually limitless. Let us begin with the most basic attitudes toward each of these liquids. There are people who dislike tea. They do not drink it, even when it is the only beverage available. There are people who dislike perfume, and never wear it, whether because of allergies or simple distaste. The case of specific tea intolerance (such as mine to oolong and jasmine) seems very similar to me to specific cases of perfume intolerance. There are some notes which simply do not sit well with some people, and they will avoid them to the best of their ability, in order not to suffer undue strife. Some people, for example, steer clear of jasmine. I myself love jasmine perfumes, but there is no way that I would drink them!

There is a broad swath of ignorant people who use “tea” in the form of “black” tea bags filled with very inexpensive, cheap-tasting, low-grade tea, just as there is a broad swath of ignorant people who use mass-marketed perfumes which they buy not for the qualities of the perfumes but because they have been persuaded to do so through advertising. 

The bottle is often also a part of the lure.

At the same time, there is a small subculture of perfume lovers who have undertaken to explore the olfactory universe just because it is out there to be explored: a vast, uncharted territory to be conquered. These people love well-crafted perfumes and the many fine nuances and distinctions which make each particular perfume unique. These people interact with one another at perfume community websites and on blogs, and they select their perfumes not on the basis of marketing but because it passes their personal inspection and coheres with their general sense of olfactory aesthetics.

Determining which perfumes to purchase requires, for self-respecting perfumistas, testing, which is where it seems that wine tasting may be closer to what many tend actually to do. Connoisseurs of tea who know their general categories will simply buy small packets of tea to drink—that is, in fact the way to test tea: to brew it up and drink it.

Wine tasting and Perfume testing

Ideally, to give a perfume a fair chance, one should wear it for the entire duration of its development and persistence. How else can one ascertain a perfume's longevity, wearability, and general aesthetic appeal? To know whether a perfume is right for one's self, it would seem that one must wear it, on one's own skin, precisely as a tea connoisseur will drink a tea in order to determine whether it should be purchased in larger quantities.

In reality, perfume testing is often carried out in a rather abrupt and perfunctory way, by taking a quick sniff off a strip, or wearing a minuscule amount which may not convey the full experience which one would have were one to partake of the luxury of spritzing on a regular-sized “serving”. The typical abbreviated testing—whether using a quick spritz from a jealously guarded tester bottle at a counter, or a few dabs from a small vial obtained from the house or a gray market decanter—is similar in some ways to the manner in which people test wine. Well, the manner in which professional wine tasters test wine, I should say.

How do ordinary people test wine? They remove the cork from a bottle and drink it. They definitely do not take a quick slurp and swirl it about their mouth before spitting it out, as professionals do. Of course, this is what professionals who test sometimes dozens of wines in succession must do, else they would be incompetent to render judgment upon the later wines tested. So this method of wine tasting has arisen with the arrival on the scene of wine professionals and consultants.

This situation raises an interesting question about whether the results obtained from testing in such a cursory way really have any bearing on the experience which consumers can expect to have when they buy a bottle of wine based on such tests. Is part of the experience of wine not actually ingesting the alcohol for which many people reach for it in the first place?

The fact that wine may impair faculties while neither perfume nor tea does, makes me think that perfume users may potentially be more in control of their perfume judgments than are wine drinkers. Let's face it: a bottle of wine which initially seemed mediocre may start to seem pretty good by the time one reaches the last glass. Indeed, by that point the “wine taster” may no longer care what the wine tastes like, singing under his breath, “Que será, que será,” or perhaps intoning some helpful advice to his companions such as: “Don't worry; be happy!”

The group most in control seem to me to be tea connoisseurs. This is not only because tea contains not a depressant but a stimulant, but also because the subculture is so obscure and does not significantly overlap or compete with the mass-market tea industry. The people who seek out specialty teas and develop tastes for exotic first- and second-flush varieties of super-rare teas from far-away estates, cannot really be wooed away by the Lipton tea company.

I think that we perfume lovers would do well to emulate the estimable members of the subculture of sophisticated tea drinkers by attempting to the best of our ability to focus more on the perfume and less on the hype, whether it be the mass advertising campaigns with which we are constantly barraged or the more exalted form of hype surrounding every new recent serial launch by niche perfumers. To retain our autonomy, to be fully in control of our perfume preferences and judgments, we need to find ways to separate out the perfumes from their packaging and promotion.

This focus on the object of critique itself is possible in the world of tea in the way that it seems much less possible in the world of wine, where hype is rife. Clearly this is because the worldwide market for wine is enormous, much greater than that even for supermarket varieties of tea. As a result, all wine drinkers are subject to the forces acting upon them when tastemakers decree that certain wines are better than others based on a five-second swirl and spit.

The reason why the most expensive bottles of wine are orders of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive bottles of perfume is itself a matter of hype, but also of demand and supply. With more people clamoring for a few select cases of allegedly great wine, the prices quickly spike. Wine shysters such as Rudy Kurniawan simply take advantage of the peculiarities of that market in rebottling lesser wines as sought-after vintages which they are not. But people succumb to such a ruse because they have placed their faith in the wine tastemakers and are not able independently to judge when they have been duped.

With perfume, we could cut through all of the hype by testing perfumes blind, with no knowledge of their provenance, although that would be logistically difficult to do. More realistically, we can attempt to test perfumes fairly by giving them a complete wear, preferably multiple wears, before pronouncing upon what we take to be their virtues and vices. To heed the alleged authority of anyone in the world of perfume nonidentical with one's self seems to me to be to walk down the path to error.

In order to achieve the heights of perfume appreciation, we need to focus more on our personal experience of wearing perfume and less on all of the irrelevant nonsense. 


Let us call it how we sniff it, my fragrant friends, 
and let us have the courage of our sniffing convictions!