I'm a huge fan of perfume. I've always had obsessions with pads (yes, sanitary pads), but ever since I entered this industry, I developed a new (un)healthy obsession with scents. Ooh the amazing array of perfumes I have lined up in my room. An expensive but immensely gratifying hobby to upkeep. Oh well, I shall not tarry any further. There's an article I would like to share so badly that I'm retyping everything from Cosmopolitan UK's August 2016 issue (pp 51-54). Okay, does this count for sufficient crediting? And not forgetting
Ingeborg van Lotringen, who so eloquently composed the following piece
. Please pardon my reproduction of your article without your consent. Your article made me laugh at parts and very frankly, it's really made my day.
How to smell interesting
Caramel or moist crotch--which would you rather smell of? The answer, as
Ingeborg van Lotringen discovers, is not as laughably weird as you'd think.
Spun sugar is the bane of my life. As a beauty journalist, you get to open a lot of bottles of fragrance, and nine times out of ten these days, out comes that blasted note of funfair.
I find it offensive, but in the Cosmopolitan office, I am in the minority. Our intern put it best when she described yet another syrupy concoction as "nice...like Britney spears' fantasy [true]. It smells like...perfume."
Exactly. Like the ubiquitous 'aquatic' note that dominated half the perfumes in the '90s (think L'Eau D'Issey...you goy it), 'gourmand' candyfloss (or ethyl maltol, its scent-molecule equivalent) has become the fragrance of our times. That may sound somewhat incongruous when 'out times' are mostly punctuated by terrorism, debt, loss and environmental doom, but it's not an accident. Perfume houses will tell you the public positively
demands fragrances of joy, smiles and freedom (as Lancome put it upon launching the cupcakey La Vie Est Belle in 2012) to offset the gloom in real life. And judging by the way any eau de praline, vanilla or caramel sells by the bucketload, our happy place for a good decade has been pudding.
In itself, that's not a bad thing. Research has shown that edible scents make men think sexy thoughts (something to do with a similarity between vanilla and mother's milk -- make of that what you will) and give us all a sense of comfort. But as with anything, you can only churn out so many variations on the same theme before senses get numbed and familiarity starts breeding contempt. And if most recent contents of my office fragrance crate are anything to go by, that's what's beginning to happen in perfume. we may have reached peak candyfloss, my friends. and in its place comes something rather more unsettling...
Something rotten, something blue
Any perfumer will tell you that the sexiest and most intoxicating scents all have something distinctly rotten at their core. "Anything 'off' or even faecal [yep, smells like poo] heightens the sexual aspects of perfume," says perfumer Roja Dove. We're talking notes like civet, musk and castoreum: glandular (including, er, anal) secretions of animals that -- don't fret -- are used in synthetic form today. "It's not like you can actually smell these in a perfume," says Dove, "but a tiny quantity triggers your brain's synapses and ignites your animal instincts." Judging by the appalled reaction to Dove's televised nuggets of wisdom from Gogglebox's armchair critics recently, this isn't a great selling point -- but you'd be wrong. Enduring classics such as Guerlain Shalimar, Dior Diorissimo and Bottega Veneta EDT all owe their "mmm, sexy" popularity to subliminal stink. It's just that you didn't know it. Enduring classics such as Guerlain Shalimar, Dior Diorissimo and Botega Veneta EDT all owe their "mmm, sexy" popularity to subliminal stink. It's just that you didn't know it.
And it's not just animal notes that can stir something within. White flowers like jasmine and tuberose are packed with the molecule indole, which, in high quantities, "smells of a recently used toilet," says Nick Gilbert of Youtube channel Love to Smell. (This may explain why Laura on the
Cosmopolitan beauty team deems pure tuberose 'disgusting'.) "Tropical fruit notews rely on sulphuric compounds that, alone, smell like rotten eggs. Oud (a resinous wood note) smells of a barn or blue cheese at intense levels." Good lord -- why would you go there?! Because, says perfume archivist James Craven of scent emporium Les Senteurs, "your subconscious detection of something 'nasty' alerts and heightens your senses, making your response more powerful and emotional. It can make a perfume truly addictive, adding intrigue that will make you want to smell it over and over." Think of it as the olfactory equivalent of Benedict Cumberbatch: unsettling to behold at first, but forcing you to do a double take and eventually to deeply appreciate its skewed beauty.
I want to be special!
This instinctive approach to finding the perfume of your dreams, as opposed to one led by marketing, is just right for a social-media generation intent on self-display, says Dove. "Perfume has become a way to express individuality,. Young consumers put far more care into their choice of scent to stand apart from the crowd." He adds that despite the fact that you cannot (yet?) smell scent through a phone screen, the internet has transformed the way we shop for fragrance. "Blogs and websites talk in detail about ingredients ang the story behind a fragrance composition, making us all connoisseurs of sorts. The more educated you are, the more open you become to different kinds of scents and the more refined your tastes become." So an 'odd' fragrance, apart from having the ability to make you love it with a passion, puts it out there that you're clever and unique. And that, apparently, is priceless: sales of niche fragrances costing more than 110 pounds were up 28% in 2015.
That's all well, but faced with an ever-swelling tsunami of scents, it's hard for most of us not to seek refuge in the familiar. If you want to cheat on your trusty perfume in favour of a lusty affair with a dangerous new one, where do you start? "By letting your head shut up and your nose take over," says Craven. That means browsing a perfumery at leisure, picking up bottles you might not even like the look of, and enlisting the help of the in-house expert. "Ask for scents they enjoy or find unusual," says Gilbert. "Try not to think of what they remind you of or what might be in it, but how you would describe it. Think of the texture, colour, density, pitch and tone. Use words you have for your other senses. Truly, trust your nose. Do you like it? Yes? Then it's fantastic."
