the smell of it

Let us suppose that a traditional hierarchy of criticism still floats out there in the ether somewhere. You know, literature and visual arts at the top, then maybe dance and theater and instrumental music, then all those things affiliated with the grubby masses like movies and pop music and TV on the next rung (I said traditional), then food and fashion, both of which are too aesthetic to rank any higher but still employ an admirable and tangible amount of skill. Then, down in the dust at the bottom, are the provinces of the effeminate and the frivolous: wine, cigars, perfume, hotels. Writing about these is just more or less an arena for rich dilettantes to throw around made-up terms like "wet rock mouth feel" or "strident floral accords," n'est-ce-pas?

One reason often given for the fruitlessness of writing about scent is that it's too personal, too evocative of individual memories. But come the hell on -- that only makes sense if hearing a certain song doesn't call to mind how it played every half hour at your old job and the sensation of the too-high cash register drawer slamming into your rib cage after each sale (the song being "Marianne" by Leonard Cohen) or if the taste Neapolitan ice cream doesn't transport you to your grandparents' yellow kitchen on a Saturday night. In other words, I don't buy that one of the five senses is any better at evoking memories than the other four.

There's also the old chestnut that goes "Writing about ______ is like dancing about architecture." This also is b.s. The whole point of writing is that you can do it about anything, if you're good, and make it interesting to read. And I'm no modern dance expert but someone has probably choreographed an homage to Frank Gehry or Frank Lloyd Wright, and it's probably pretty cool.

Writing about writing does pose less of a challenge than writing about music or art or dance, of course. Attempting to translate the visual into the verbal was my favorite part of art history classes and essentially the reason I majored in such a useless subject.

So maybe that's why I've developed a thorough appreciation of perfume reviews lately. How does one convey the sensation of smelling something into language? And not just language for its own sake, as with some poetic turn of phrase, but into words that enable readers to mentally conjure the same fragrance and decide whether or not it's something they want their bodies to smell like.

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez are the reigning monarchs of this particular art. Their Perfumes: The Guide is an encyclopedic work from 2008 (with updates available online) that can be read from A-Z, it's so entertaining. It provides a good foundation, including several essays and a glossary, and immediately made me want to hunt down and smell every 5 start scent they describe. Take this bit, from the review of Dior's Dune:

"Dune is a strong contender for Bleakest Beauty in all of perfumery. It is clearly headed from the start for toward that peculiarly inedible cheap-chocolate drydown that made Must, Allure, and a thousand others, though Dune's is the best of the lot, dissonant but interesting. But the way it gets there is extraordinary, with a beguiling transparency, even freshness, particularly in the anisic carrot-seed top notes. It is hard to pin down what makes Dune so unsmiling from top to bottom; it's as if every perfumer accord had become a Ligeti cluster chord, drained of life, flesh-toned in the creepy way of artificial limbs, not real ones. Marvelous."

Color me fascinated. Of course, the 1 star reviews are much funnier: "A trite, canned-fruit-salad concoction of no interest except to illustrate the cynicism of its makers," Turin writes of Armani Remix for Her.

This being the age of Web 2.0 (or Web.2, as a former professor of mine would always say), the anonymous hordes have of course gotten in the perfume-reviewing game. Obtaining samples has gotten easier and cheaper thanks to the internet, too; instead of trekking to Grasse, or at least NYC, one can now purchase .5 ml samples of even highly obscure fragrances from sites like The Perfumed Court for $3-10. So that's at least a good 50 new smells a year if one were to allot a $6 weekly perfume budget.

Basenotes and Makeup Alley are the main places to find the layman's opinions, along with a fair number of amateur blogs. Like Yelp or Netflix ratings, reading between the lines is key. Sometimes it's possible to tell that a scent that one person hates is exactly the sort of thing you will love or vice versa, such as when a Makeup Alley user named fitmom2 declares Jessica Simpson's perfume, Fancy, "yummy, sweet, soft, romantic...If you love the smell of cupcakes, frosting, soft petals, and vanilla, this is superb." And although there's a whiff of mass hysteria about it, certain perfumes elicit such strong reactions that it's clear something is going on, whether it's Art or not.

Apres L'Ondee (forgive my lack of appropriate accents), a Guerlain scent first formulated in 1906, is widely held to be one such masterpiece. The name means "After the Rainstorm," and according to Turin and Sanchez it's one of the 20 best ever composed. Reading the peanut gallery reviews makes it sound even more like a magical elixer:


This makes me feel spent and hopeful, as though I'd been crying my eyes out and have just realized that things will get better. Chopin in a bottle.

Pale, impressionistic watercolor evoking the saddest damn song you ever heard, the one you keep playing over and over again because it puts you in such a good mood. Fleeting and lovely, emotional and nostalgic, this is a fragrance for a woman who doesn't really mind being a little bit sad.

Sometimes this fragrance moves me to tears of joy. When I wear it, I feel like I am being bathed in bright, bright, sunlight. I think it conjures some memory deep in my subconscious that soothes my soul. I don't wear it all the time because it is so difficult to obtain. I will never be without this.

A smell that makes you cry? I've cried at books, movies, songs, but never to my recollection a scent. So I bought a sample. And here I sit with the last few drops smudged into my wrist. It smells a little like sweet herbs, a little like rain, a little like powder, a bit like what I thought lavender smelled like before I had ever actually smelled lavender. I am not currently weeping. But maybe I lack a certain faculty of discernment, just as I can't tell an E flat from a B sharp by ear, or whether the baba ghanouj needs more salt or more garlic. It's a good smell, and distinctive, probably one I will be able to recognize easily if I ever smell it again.

But it dissipates almost instantly, which sort of defeats the point of perfume. Lately I've taken to wearing Bois D'Iris, a more modern variation on the theme that's a bit earthier (it smells like a flower that still has wet dirt on the roots) and lasts longer. The idea of finding The One, the single signature fragrance that somehow both expresses your worldview and locks your scent into the lizard brain of anyone whose nose gets close enough to your neck, has to abandoned if there is any hope of true connoisseurship. It'd be like trying to pick a single theme song for your whole life.

So maybe I will post some quick Turin and Sanchez style perfume reviews of the samples I've amassed, to see how I do at the scent-to-language translation. Or maybe that would be inane. In any case, I will certainly keep our audience updated the moment I find the smell that makes me cry.