In their quest for scents with a genuinely distinctive style, bloggers and maverick perfumers are in danger of intellectualising a basic instinct. Better not to lose sight of the reason why we should derive pleasure from wearing them.
— From Led by the Nose at the Financial Times, with many thanks to Maria for the link!
This article can also relate to food. Too often when a chef tries to prepare a unique meal or come up with something so out of the box he misses the target all together. Sometimes all someone would want is a classic cheeseburger to eat and some just like to wear the classic scents.
Agreed. I remember reading an interview with the founder of Chuao chocolates and one of the questions posed was with regard to the most creative (and not necessarily “marketable”) chocolate he felt he’d ever made, to which he replied he made a batch of dark chocolate truffles filled with garlic cream or something similar. I believe there were a few other examples but can’t find the link at the moment.
There’s definitely something to be said for the comfort scent. Some days I want to smell like I slept in a pile of patch-drizzled pencil shavings while curled up in a cedar chest, but other days, I just want something easy and effortless. That can be surprisingly hard to find, though lots of classics seem to fill that category fairly well. And the NR line also seems to do a good job when I want soft and pretty without attacking the entire room with unruly sillage.
I love garlic, and I love chocolate (especially dark chocolate), and I tend to put chocolate in or on anything sweet (cake, cookies, fruit, ice cream), and garlic in anything that isn’t supposed to be sweet (meat, vegetables, salads, bread). There is not way, however, I would ever put chocolate and garlic together. Some things are just not compatible.
I suppose this goes into the whole notion of perfume as an art. To me an art form must be able to express the whole realm of human experience (whether concretely or abstractly). I don’t think perfume can really do that, and still be perfume. For instance, there are wonderful novels about “garbage” (Our Mutual Friend, Delilo’s Underworld), films and tv about “garbage” (for example the Sopranos and Slumdog Millionaire, which I remember having a scene where the children scavange), collages and sculptures which use discarded materials, but would one ever want a perfume that smelt like garbage.
I am sure it is intellectually and chemically possible, but would you want it?
On the other hands, many scent innovations are beautiful, if not classic. Commes Des Garcons perfumes smell like Schziuon (sp?) peppercorns to me. (A hard to get hold of, smoky spice which is not at all like chile peppers). Not a traditional scent, but incredibly beautiful to me.
Exactly. The intellectual pursuit of the challenge of creating shock, tears, or an emotional response in any art form can be worthwhile. But as you say, do we really want to incorporate it into our lives on a personal basis and live with it. There are many things we can appreciate for their ability to capture, or elicit a certain response, in a particular moment only. I don’t necessarily want to shock everyone around me ALL the time
Thanks to you Healthy, I’m craving a cheesebuger now.
Lunch!
We have a lot of wild onions here. In the spring, every time I mow the lawn, I get a craving for a hamburger.
Some really good points raised here. Sometimes, you just want to smell good – that’s mostly what I want. But if you’ve already got “pretty” covered…isn’t it human nature to branch out and experiment? For example, I doubt that I’ll buy a bottle of Dzongkha, but I do “enjoy” the weirdness of my sample.
Oh, if only I could resist the fabulous weirdness of Dzongkha. I’m afraid an fb is undoubtedly in my future… CDG’s incense series was the gateway line, and now I’m longing to buy Shaal Nur, Messe de Minuit, Dzongkha and have been unable to put down my decant of Zagorsk or bottle of Barbara Bui for very long in the meantime.
Dzongkha is so wonderfully peppery, smokey and strange but just feels so natural when I put it on. Maybe it’s all the incense I burn going to my head, but I’m in love.
I am one of those pretty perfume gals. It seems though that the less depressed I am, and the more secure I feel, the more imaginative I become in my perfume experiences. Most women were raised on “pretty is the goal”. Women these days are raised (hopefully) to be their own person. Some people like the country, some the city, and some the exotic out of the way places. No-one once to visit a waste treatment plant. I’m with her on some perfumes, i.e., Secretions Magnifique, but mostly, people want individuality that is also pleasing. Viva la niche scents!
Except for the ones that smell like chocolate ice-cream with anchovies…but that’s just “my” opinion.
Great article! So well written. I love Dominique Ropion but I certainly don’t love all his fragrances. I don’t think it is all about intellectualizing the instinctual ability to smell – we smell too much crappy chem smells all around us all the time. The nose knows what smells good, naturally. If intellectualising makes me want to smell Safari or Ysatis or Carnal Flower rather than bounce or glade, so be it.
That is a great article but it lacks historical perspective. From way back in the mid-twentieth century, long before niche perfumery, perfumers were working with ‘dirty’ scents and questioning conventional notions of beauty. Maybe not garbage, but animalic notes, and smoke and leather and so on. Estee Lauder is the most mainstream design house imaginable and it brought out Azuree in 1969. So I wonder what happened in the 70s and 80s that cut perfumers off at the knees?
Actually, perfumers have been using dirty notes a lot longer than that. I have seen a number of perfume recipes from the 16th and 17th centuries, and they all called for musk or civet or ambergris. I think it was probably only in the late 19th century that these notes came to be considered “dirty”, hence unsuitable for ladies.
The fact is that many people consider that musk and smoke and leather smell good. What I cannot conceive of is wearing a perfume that smells bad. To each his own, and that is why we have so many to choose from, but–I do not understand the need for weirdness. It perplexes me when someone dismisses a fragrance by saying that it is not strange enough, or that it is “merely pretty”. I might sometimes be attracted to a scent that is a little strange, if it is also beautiful, but if it does not smell good, forget it.
Good points! I do understand the need for weirdness, but not necessarily in perfume. Artists in lots of fields explore the idea of there being beauty in ugliness, but perfume is so personal. You make it physically part of yourself. I don’t want to smell of garbage, thanks very much.
A scent I am trying at the moment is SSS’s Ambre Noir, which combines woods and leather and other dark notes with a rose scent as well. I’m intrigued by the way the rose reaches out from behind this dark curtain, but am still not sure if it’s a scent I can wear.