Scent and Subversion (34 page)

W
ith over a thousand perfume launches a year, including more slapdash celebrity fragrances than there are T.J.Maxxes on which to unload them, it’s hard not to feel that perfume has exhausted its possibilities, and that all we have to expect from scents are rehashes of what’s already been created. And for perfumers who still believe perfume is an art, bad news has come in the form of the EU’s recent announcement that it will propose even more severe restrictions on natural perfume ingredients, including oakmoss, rose, jasmine, and lavender. By limiting and even forbidding the use of certain ingredients, these restrictions destroy perfumers’ palettes. Imagine telling a painter she could no longer use cobalt blue or yellow. As Frédéric Malle of Éditions de Parfums Frédéric Malle said in a recent article, “If this law goes ahead, I am finished, as my perfumes are all filled with these ingredients.” He is no doubt speaking for Guerlain, Chanel, Christian Dior, and any future perfumer who wants a real perfume palette to work with.

Leaving aside the fact that perfumers will be limited in what they can “say” with their perfumes, what lies in store for its future? Will it still be exciting? What are its possibilities? What do we have to look forward to?

In addition to the beautiful perfumes that manage to eke their way through the dreck, there are also perfume provocateurs who are moving perfume and even the idea of perfume forward. Whether by “queering” perfume, creating scents that smell like things in the world, emphasizing perfume’s decadent associations or imagining perfume’s function beyond the aesthetic—into the politically progressive—the following figures in the perfume world are nudging perfume in exciting directions.

I
n 2006, Étienne de Swardt launched a new perfume house whose dadaist name and punk ethos, État Libre d’Orange (The Free State of Orange), hinted that their perfume would be iconoclastic. In press materials, interviews, and on the brand’s website, État Libre d’Orange (ELD) declared itself liberated from the restrictions of modern, mass-market perfumery. The brand would promote “licentiousness and seduction,” “craftsmanship and creativity,” and “olfactory insubordination.” This declaration of independence would be a return, they claimed, “to the ideals of perfume—its carnal energy, sensual power, and the essential, erotic expression of the body and its desire.”

It was a good time for État Libre d’Orange to stage its olfactory and cultural insurgency. Perfumery was just beginning to emerge from a decade that had privileged perfumes with transparent, clean, aquatic accords—when it wasn’t producing fruity, gourmand scents. And in place of the aspirational ethos reflected in the names of such mass-market hits of the late 1980s and 1990s, scents called Beautiful, Knowing, and Happy, État Libre d’Orange offered the louche and the antiaspirational: perfumes with names like Putain des Palaces (“Hotel Slut”), Delicious Closet Queen, Fat Electrician, and État Libre d’Orange’s anti-clean cri de coeur and first commercial perfume, the magnificently outré Sécrétions Magnifiques (2006).

If the body had been absent from most 1990s perfumes, État Libre d’Orange’s creative director de Swardt and the perfumer he chose to help realize his vision, Antoine Lie, brought it back with a vengeance and a twist with Sécrétions Magnifiques. Wanting to create a perfume that would shock people out of their office-scented complacency, de Swardt approached Lie with an offer he couldn’t refuse. For État Libre d’Orange’s first commercial scent, he wanted Lie to help him create a revolutionary, shocking perfume. They would work together, but as with all this brand’s perfumes, the perfumer would have the final say in what ended up in the bottle, and, ultimately, the marketplace. The perfume brief? Sécrétions Magnifiques was to be a perfume that smells like the body right
before orgasm—literally and metaphorically. It wouldn’t simply be suggestive of bodily smells, it would smell, according to the original perfume description, “Like blood, sweat, sperm, saliva … as real as an olfactory coitus.” And thus Sécrétions Magnifiques, État Libre d’Orange’s first scent, was unleashed upon the world.

Facilitating heterosexual seduction, romance, and love was twentieth-century perfume’s raison d’etre, if perfume advertisements from the past are any indication. Evening in Paris, Intimate, and Ambush, for example, were all promised as aids to heterosexual union, each one offering feminine elixirs that could lure and trap men for romance. From their cartoonish pop packaging, campiness, and pervy/queer sensibility, État Libre d’Orange shifted perfumery from this old-school, aspirational, heterosexual matrix onto a countercultural, explicitly queer one. And although its website copy suggests that the sex represented in Sécrétions Magnifiques is missionary style, its acronym refers to sex that combines violence with tenderness, and shifts us from the twentieth-century perfume ethos of heterosexual romance and gender conformity to a kind of no-limits queer space.

In a phone interview, Lie told me the thinking behind all of Sécrétions Magnifiques’s notes.

“Because your blood pumps quicker when you’re excited,” Lie explained, “there was the blood accord.” Adrenaline, which doesn’t have a smell, was something he translated into perfume notes. He wanted to create an accord that was energizing, so he created an accord with a lime and grapefruit effect, “with a touch of sulfur,” he adds, bitter and slightly metallic. Next up, the molecule Azurone, for its saliva aspect. “There’s an overdose of Azurone in Sécrétions Magnifiques,” he says. “It’s usually a part per million dilution, but I used it without dilution at all. It plays the role of something wet, animalic, sweaty. It smells a bit like saliva when you lick your skin and then smell it. It might not be that pleasant for a fragrance, but for this fragrance, it was good. It was perfect.”

To make the scent smell a bit more pleasant, he added a milky accord, which also references, even if in a token suggestion, feminine body fluids.

“When I mixed up the four accords—sweat, sperm, saliva, and blood—it was very difficult. Sharp. Very metallic/animalic. I needed to wrap it in something pleasant and sensual, but also something that would make it easier. I added this milky accord, and since milk is also a fluid from the female body, it was perfect; it was coherent with this story.”

Lie says that although he has a molecule that smells uncannily of sperm, he was adamant with de Swardt that he did not want the perfume to smell overwhelmingly
sperm-like. I gingerly asked him, “But Sécrétions Magnifiques still kinda smells like sperm, right?” He laughs. “Yes, it’s kind of there. You have a feeling of it because you’ve got elements that are salty and slightly mushroomy, but I did not include the molecule that really smells like sperm. For some people, Sécrétions Magnifiques is very sperm-like, and some don’t smell it at all. So that’s the beauty of it … because it still means that at the moment of the ejaculation, it’s there; it’s just not quite in your face, you know!”

To understand the scents that Lie creates now, like Comme des Garçon’s Eau de Parfum, with its brown Scotch tape and glue accords, and Blood Concept’s RED+MA, a scent inspired by milk and blood, it’s important to see the milieu Lie emerged from. He came of age in perfumery during the regime of clean. From 1993 to 1999, he moved to the United States and worked as a perfumer in what he called a new generation of fragrance. “I was in the new clean, very transparent, American school at the time,” he says. “Fragrance was not here to disturb but to make you feel clean.”

In addition to the clean style of perfumery in the 1990s, there was a big shift between the classical, artisanal fragrance industry to a more-international industry, in which perfume-by-committee became the norm. “Suddenly, we went from a situation where perfumes were developed only by a few people—from one perfumer with the guy who decides to put the fragrance in a bottle—to suddenly a team of marketing developers and fragrance testers. More people were involved, and suddenly everybody was providing input. And because so many people were involved, perfume lacked personality and daring.” He says that after about ten years of working in this environment, he got bored.

After my conversation with Lie, it occurs to me that there is something neither of us discussed, but that adds another layer to Sécrétions Magnifiques’s subversiveness. De Swardt and Lie’s creation deviated from the School of Clean, but it didn’t abandon it altogether. The brilliant irony is, Sécrétions Magnifiques
is
a fresh, marine fragrance, but in a radically different way than the watermelon-y and ozonic Cool Water and L’Eau d’Issey are fresh marine scents. After all, bodily fluids captured at the moment of / right before their emission could be described as fresh. And Sécrétions Magnifiques’s Azurone accord, which has a seaweed aspect, is certainly an element of the sea, and surely accounts in part for what Luca Turin described as its “bilge” note. In addition, its milky/marine accords also archly reference female bodily fluids. Women’s bodily scents have long been linked misogynistically with “fishy” smells, but Sécrétions Magnifiques’s evocation of the feminine body—in however an attenuated form compared to its masculine bent—seems to cleave more closely to the olfactory version of writer Jeanette Winterson’s poetic paean to women’s bodily smells, in
Written on the Body:
“She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child …”

So what does Sécrétions Magnifiques actually smell like? Sniffing it has become an initiation rite for every self-described perfumista, and there’s even a genre of YouTube
videos depicting sniffers’ “first time” with the scent. (The video of Katie Puckrik’s “first time” with Sécrétions Magnifiques is practically required viewing!) Although it often elicits exclamations of disapproval to downright revulsion (a friend of mine—true story—got a migraine after sniffing it and promptly went home and vomited), it also inspires curiosity and a begrudging admiration, if not outright devotion.

Sécrétions Magnifiques starts out like a dreamy, soft floral, but soon (cue the
Psycho
soundtrack), the perfume begins to take a decidedly biological turn. A metallic blood accord with a lightly marine smell combines with what soon becomes a milky (to my nose), overly sweet drydown whose unnerving longevity on skin is like no other perfume I’ve ever smelled. Scrub it off if you will, Sécrétions Magnifiques does not come off until it wants to. I’ve had people confirm my experience—that trying to wash it off made it even stronger!

Sécrétions Magnifiques is also a complex olfactory representation of bodies and sex. The website copy says in purple prose that it’s “an ode to the pinnacle of sexual pleasure …,” but initially, its scent evokes male pleasure. Sécrétions Magnifiques smells, to put it bluntly, like fresh ejaculate. But it also smells like the scents of sex, providing an almost-olfactory montage of a sex scene: first, the smell of mouths on mouths and other body parts, the scent of saliva, skin, and even excitement represented by the adrenaline accord. Although the blood and adrenaline accord are representative of fluids inside our body, they also represent the smells of violence and accidents. Freud likened our sex drives to the death drive. Sécrétions Magnifiques meditates on this in the olfactory realm. It folds the violence of its sexual referents into its acronym, SM, sadomasochism. And it folds olfactory metaphors of death, like blood and decay, into its more-ordinary perfume notes. Love it or hate it, Sécretions Magnifiques is a perfume masterpiece.

I recently came across notes I took in 2008 after smelling Sécrétions Magnifiques for the first time, shortly after I began my foray into perfume. I never meant for anyone to read them, and I was embarrassed to write my true impressions, which seemed shocking even to me. However, in hindsight, these notes seem like a more-accurate description of Sécrétions Magnifiques than the politer, more-censored versions I’ve come up with over the years. So to stay true to the perfume’s daring, I’m going to take a risk; here are my notes in their entirety, unedited.

There’s a magic trick I like to play when I’m introducing people to perfume, and it involves pulling out CB I Hate Perfume’s Soaked Earth, an uncanny rendition not only of the smells of dirt—mineral elements, stones, twigs, water—but also the emotion embedded in the memories of that smell. No one is indifferent to this scent, so powerfully does it pull you into the memory experience we all have of what the ground smells like after rain.

One day, walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans after a huge rainstorm, I found myself smiling and thinking, “This smells just like Soaked Earth.” The Simulacrum, just as postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard had predicted, had superseded the Real. A century after perfume styles shifted from representational, one-note florals to abstract perfumes that seemed more modern, Christopher Brosius and his perfume line CB I Hate Perfume returns to a naturalistic ethos—but with a twist. Nature is not a privileged olfactory obsession; it is but one referent among many.

For Christopher Brosius, the world’s smells are already their own perfume. In 1993, after a stint at Kiehl’s as a perfumer, Brosius started his own perfume brand, Demeter, where he created an extraordinary scent library: a collection of scents that smelled like things in the world, from Dust, Vinyl, Playdough, and Paperback books, to Snow. The latter, an uncanny olfactory representation of snow and its effect—its coldness rendered with a touch of mint, and a bit of earth representing what’s beneath—garnered him a FiFi award for Best Fragrance of 2000.

After Brosius left Demeter in 2004 and created his niche line, CB I Hate Perfume, he retweaked and renamed some of his classics from Demeter, making explicit what was only implicit in Demeter: Christopher Brosius hates perfume, or, to be specific, commercial perfume—its synthetic musks, and its encouragement of people to smell like everyone else. His online manifesto is nothing if not emphatic about what he hates about perfume. In some perfumers’ hands, perfume becomes “an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same unnatural shape,” or “An opaque shell concealing everything—revealing nothing.” And if you can’t be shamed into buying niche over mass-market perfume, perhaps my favorite Christopher Brosius quote will change your mind: “People who smell like everyone else disgust me.”