Apparently Luca Turin, who wrote the damn book everyone's been talking about, doesn't believe that skin chemistry affects scent at all - or, more recently, that the difference is negligible and "only occurs in the topnotes". Right, only in the topnotes, only in that heady rush of smells that hits you right when you spray it on and makes you want to shell out $80 for what is essentially an invisible garment in a bottle. Anyhow, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez smelled everything on tester strips for The Guide.
Say wha-ha-ha?
Well, LT is a chemist so his manly, rigorously objective method must be science. Science, y'all! But La Niebla and I, rank amateurs as we are, can tell you that smelling something on paper and smelling it on your arm for the rest of the day are two entirely different matters. Fragrances just develop differently on warm skin than on paper - most obviously for the simple reason that we are LIVING BEINGS and therefore give off heat, which affects the sillage and probably the order and intensity of the notes. Which is why when you exercise after wearing a scent all day it can come back and hit you with a fresh burst of scent that is a near-cousin to the topnote moment.
Paper? It doesn't get to the gym much. Nor does it eat spicy food or swill down Sam Adams or smoke cigarettes or use laundry detergent. Paper, as a character, is two-dimensional. While skin, with its varying degrees of dryness and oiliness, its saturation by chemicals and antihistamines and coffee and spices, its melanin levels and its moisturizers, is not only different from paper, it's different from other skin. Depending on the day or moment, it's different from itself (paging Derrida).
Anyhoo, now we have an excuse to diss LT/TS whenever their opinions don't agree with ours. They (especially LT) seem fascinated by the architectural properties of a scent, the way it was conceived in the lab, the conceptual framework, in fact, the genius of its creator - all things that I'm sure come through perfectly well on stiff, dry, raspy squares of processed tree fiber. La Niebla and I - and probably most perfume lovers - are more interested in the dispersal of scent, its interactions with our mood and daily life, the associations it calls up, the women who wear it, the dreams it gives you if you wear it to bed. Power to the perfumanity, people.
2 comments:
A*Men!
TS & LT definitely are as interested (more interested?) in genius than in smell, in theory than in pleasure. How else would Angel get 5 stars? Jeebus.
Stinkers of the world, unite!
However, I have to make a case for the 3-dimensionality of paper - I am SUPER interested in all these "decaying paper" scents that I am finding out about!
That'll teach me to speak for both of us!
However, I protest that even a "decaying paper" scent would still smell better on skin than on paper. Take that, paper!
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