Up with Perfumanity

An awesome article on skin chemistry at Bois de Jasmin.

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.

Annick Goutal, Les Nuits d'Hadrien, Eau d'Hadrien

Summer scents from my Annick Goutal haul.

Eau d'Hadrien: Lemon Pledge comes to mind, which brings back wonderful memories of dusting my great-grandmother's piano but is not entirely desireable on the skin. A hint of grass somewhere in the drydown, but it still smells a bit too much like fruit-loops.

Les Nuits d'Hadrien: When I want to smell like a dude, this is the dude I want to smell like. The bitter orange peel note - bergamot? I still don't really know what bergamot is - accompanies a slightly aggressive oakmoss, which then dries down to mild spices. A light, brisk, pleasantly acidic cologne that doesn't take itself too seriously, plus the bottle matches my hair.

Of course neither of these last longer than a heartbeat, but maybe in the middle of the summer reapplying throughout the day will feel refreshing rather than annoying.

Serge Lutens, Sa Majesté La Rose & Miel de Bois

Miel de Bois and Sa Majesté La Rose are like gourmet comfort foods. Both start out as good examples of highly recognizable, traditional scents (cathedral incense, rose), with a twist (honey, nutmeg). The nutmeg-rose combo is especially lovely - the hint of spice suffuses the rose rather than peeking forward from its petals. It's a soft, absorbent spice, not a sharp, bright one. Spice cake, maybe. I don't love the honey - it remains too separate from the incense and seems like an afterthought.

Eventually, both perfumes fade back into their traditional forms, until they might as well be essential oils. The drydowns are like that hot guy at your college who played guitar in an indie-rock band and studied abroad in South Africa for a semester. Years later, you learned that he had settled down with a consulting job and a family and a loft and was pulling a solid 6 figures. The rose drydown especially has that complacent knowledge of how comfortable and bright its future will be.

Rose is the one fragrance that can handle powder (usually powder resides in that geriatric Chanel No. 5 territory). I love the powder-musk drydown of a good rose. I love it. The drydown of the Miel de Bois is less pleasant - as the honey fades completely, the incense has a little while sit on its own before it turns from the vast, smoky, wood and stone combo of my catechised youth, into something brighter, coniferous. There's a hint of cheap sport in the later drydown, of that juniper, locker-room aroma of Irish Spring Soap and men's shaving lotion, as if our hero had to downgrade from a chic urban loft to a bungalow in Jersey.

Pilar and Lucy, tiptoing through chambers of the moon

It should be fairly clear by now that I am easily seduced by names. The more fantastic the promise, the more snake oil I am likely to buy.

Alas, this Pilar and Lucy scent only lived up to the "tiptoing" part of its name. Its pretty, inoffensive floral note creeps in on little cat feet of powdery musk and then is gone before you know it. Wearing it out, I had difficulty believing, as the promo materials claim, that I was being "romanced under a moonlit night with the faint scent of a tuberose garden lingering somewhere near." Bad writing aside (the website also urges us to "trust our surrender"), the description is just wrong. The tuberose garden is indeed somewhere near, but it's not nighttime - it's seven o'clock in the morning and I'm fresh out of the shower, catching a moment to myself in the breakfast room before the kids are out of bed.

Unlike "Perfect Veil," this scent does call a real woman to mind, an admirable one in fact. She is one of those sensible women who eat healthy food, meditate, and raise competent children. I picture a well-appointed Regency-era interior in cornflower blue, with Elinor Dashwood carrying on her polite correspondence at a writing table. It's a steady, sober, practical, powdery-soft kind of feminine smell, suitable for reflecting on one's virtues but not one's sins.

In other words, not for me. For some women, this scent is probably wonderfully calming, like L'Heure Bleue, the Guerlain classic that also doesn't suit me in the slightest. For me, it is a cage of stillness. Like yoga, it just reminds me that I feel most alive when in motion, and most relaxed when I'm asleep.

Olfactory Fatigue: Symptoms & Remedies

Smelling perfume is exactly like drinking alcohol. The more you drink, the drunker you get, and the less you can taste what you're drinking (substitute your sense of smell for your sense of taste, and a mild lightheadedness for outright drunkenness).

There are ineffectual quick fixes for olfactory fatigue - sniffing coffee beans or stepping out for air - but they're the equivalent of a cup of coffee. They stimulate, but don't really detoxicate.

This would all be fine - who doesn't love a good drunken stupor? - but problem is that the longer you're in a shop, the more compelled you feel to buy something, and so your ability to choose wisely is inversely proportional to your imagined need to do so. As happened yesterday when Oedipa and I took a field trip to a place where you can mix and match essential oils to create your own perfumes. We learned quite a bit - what certain notes smell like on their own (alas, no vetiver or musk were available - two of the scents we were both most curious about), how the concentration effects the fragrance of the final product (I love the texture of essential oils, but found that undiluted, they can all too often smell like air freshener).

Lucky for us, essential oils are usually much cheaper than perfume (at least at this shop they were), and so we each only paid $12. In a real perfume store, however, you needn't feel any compunction to buy anything. Like buying a car, people expect you to be careful about your purchase, to research it thoroughly, and to take several different cars on test drives. I scored 4 different Serge Lutens samples yesterday, and by this morning, I had decided I didn't love any of them.

Anyway, my final word on essential oils is that for the novice, they are perhaps best on their own, for when you really do just want to smell like a flower, or a tree or whatever. There are worse things in life than smelling uncomplicated.

The Book (Part the Second)

My only consolation about Luca Turin's dismissive review of Issey Miyake's L'Eau d'Issey, is that the review is incredibly long, inches longer than any of the other reviews. So whether or not he ultimately likes L'Eau, it at least inspires verbosity! The most devastating moments are when Turin compares my favorite dusty floral to a Glade Plug-In, then to Windex, and then, horror of horrors, to cK One. In any case, he truly seems to struggle with the fact that "nearly everyone [he] knew owned a bottle."

I realize that accusing a perfumisto of snobbery may be akin to accusing a Pro-Lifer of being antifeminist - not exactly part of the job description, but far from a surprise, and maybe it really is part of the job description.

L'Eau d'Issey, I love you, and I think you smell great, even though I'm having a torrid affair with a book that hates you. It's nothing personal, I promise...


Errata: It turns out Tania Sanchez wrote this review, not Luca Turin.

Creative Scentualization, Perfect Veil

Apparently this scent is supposed to replicate the smell of skin, whatever that means. I mean, the idea of wearing a skin-scented perfume on your own skin is almost kind of Hannibal Lector-ish in a way, isn't it? But hey, I like skin. I'm intriqued.

So I dab it on. There's some clean, gentle musk. There's some whitewashed vanilla. There's a whisper of peach in the opening, the barest hint of an anonymous flower in the heart. On one of my wrists I'm smelling sandalwood. No wait, that's yesterday's Vetiver.

My first thought was the nursery, but this would be an infant that never once howled with rage or pooped its jammies. (For the real thing, check out Petite Cherie.) This scent is so . . . passive. Like it's sitting in an easy chair in a scrupulously maintained nursing home where the smell of antiseptic has been expertly masked by the softest air fresheners.

This is society's collective fantasy of what women should smell like: completely free of experience, devoid of all signs of life. It's skin that never sweats, never ages, never reeks of lovemaking or garlic or gasoline. It is, in fact, perfect. "Perfect Veil" is therefore the perfect name for this profoundly ideological fragrance.

Ugh, I'm going to go douse myself in Vetiver now.