The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent

I’d always had full access to the family bookshelves, but these two particular volumes were understandably not meant for a young girl’s eyes: The Sensuous Woman by ‘J’ and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. It’s a wonder my barely pubescent head didn’t explode after reading a sex manual and a feminist essay hot on its heels. There was ‘J’, explaining ‘how to drive a man to ecstasy’ with ‘the Butterfly Flick’ and ‘the Silken Swirl’ (I practised them on an ice-cream cone), all the better to catch a male and keep him. And there was Greer, thundering that learning to catch a male and keep him, as girls were trained to do from an early age, led straight to the frustration, rage and alienation of the suburban housewife. ‘J’ advocated games, disguises and elaborate sexual scenarios – the scene in which a wife re-does the connubial bedroom with mirrored ceiling and leopard-print bed-sheets was seared in my mind for ever, and may explain the pattern of the cushions on my couch. ‘I’m sick of the masquerade,’ raged Greer. ‘I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex … I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.’

Though they couldn’t have been more different, both books were pure products of the sexual and feminist revolution of the 60s, and they did have one message in common: women had sexual desires and wanting to fulfil them didn’t mean you were ‘bad’. I was still a few years away from putting the Silken Twirl into practice, and nowhere near renouncing feminine adornment since I barely had access to it. In fact, I was still young enough to remember the fun of dressing up in my mother’s cast-offs and Geneviève’s fripperies. But I did learn a lesson from Greer: the trappings of femininity to which I so aspired were just that, trappings. You could put them on and take them off. You didn’t have to be them. It could be a game, like playing dressing-up, rather than an obligation. Somehow, the rich, ripe Bal à Versailles I kept sniffing while I read the forbidden books became enmeshed with those lessons. Perfume, at least in my household, was as subversive as sex or feminism: a claim laid to a world beyond Ivory Soap and lawnmowers, as well as my mother’s personal manifesto against bedsores and bedpans. At the Lakeshore General Hospital, she dealt daily with the human body in its most inglorious states. Nature she knew, and she was doing her best to stop it from doing its stinking, miserable worst. But she also wanted an option on artifice; she wanted Versailles and the useless, futile, sinful beauty of it; she wanted to go to the ball.

My father was far from alone in his indictment of perfume: though his aversion was probably due to his hyper-sensitivity rather than to moral or philosophical reasons, he was in fact only following in the footsteps of a long line of male authority figures. Philosophers, priests and physicians had been railing for centuries against it, cursing women for snatching it from the altars of the gods and diverting it for erotic purposes.

The Ancient Greeks were the first to sound the alarm on fragrant substance abuse. Perfume was the potent lure used by the enchantress Circe to ensnare the wily Ulysses while she turned his companions into swine, and by the courtesans who diverted the fruitful union of man and woman in their sterile embraces … A measured, reasonable use of scent could stimulate desire, the wise men granted, hence its use in wedding rituals, but the operational word was ‘measured’. In The Republic, Plato warns against ‘clouds of incense and perfumes and garlands and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life’ that turn ‘the sting of desire’ into madness. Man must not be led by lust and, though a drop of sweet-smelling stuff might promote marital harmony, an excessive use of it disrupted the balance between mind and body. Though the very nature of perfume was divine because all beauty springs from the divine, explains the historian Jean-Pierre Vernant in The Gardens of Adonis, ‘in erotic seduction it is diverted, led astray, directed towards a pretence of the divine, a misleading appearance of beauty concealing a very different reality: feminine bestiality.’

But it was for its wastefulness rather than its immorality that the hard-nosed Roman empire condemned it. ‘Perfumes form the objects of a luxury which may be looked upon as being the most superfluous of any, for pearls and jewels, after all, do pass to a man’s representative, and garments have some durability, but unguents lose their odour in an instant, and die away the very hour they are used,’ grumbles Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. ‘The very highest recommendation of them is, that when a female passes by, the odour which proceeds from her may possibly attract the attention of those even who till then are intent upon something else.’ Talk about damning with faint praise.

As for the Old Testament, it is lush with fragrance – ‘My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts,’ says the ‘dark but comely’ bride of the Song of Songs. And the New Testament does feature two fragrant episodes: in the first, an unnamed sinner washes Jesus’ feet with her tears before anointing them with precious oils. In the second, it is Mary of Bethany who pours costly spikenard on his head in anticipation of his funeral rites. Even then, there’s male grumbling, since Judas considers the money would have been better spent on helping the poor. But as a rule, Christianity dealt much more harshly with scents. They were part of pagan rituals, especially the highly popular imported Asian religions which competed with the new Christian cult in the Late empire; worse still, they could induce men to sin. Not only did Christian women need to distinguish themselves from the pagans who marinated themselves in scent, but they should strive to make themselves ugly so they wouldn’t arouse lust, urged Tertullian in the 2nd century. Woman was ‘the gateway of the Devil’ and by adorning herself, she not only led fellow Christians astray: she defaced the work of God. The body was contemptible and so were bodily pleasures. The only sweet smell was that of a spotless soul. Sin stank.

For the Church, saints were the only beings whose corpses didn’t exhale the stench of corruption which was the destiny of all living creatures. Their mortal remains were said to give off suave effluvia years or even centuries after their death: the odour of sanctity. Conversely, the strongest stench was raised by the ultimate sinner, the heiress of the temptress Eve whose wiles caused humanity to be cast from the Garden of Eden: the whore.

The etymology of many Latin language words for ‘whore’ (pute in French) is derived from putere, ‘to stink’. Prostitutes, it was believed, wore fragrance both to attract their prey and to cover up the emanations of the male secretions festering inside their bodies, venom they spread from lover to lover. When the olfactory-obsessed Émile Zola writes about the courtesan Nana in the eponymous book, he calls her ‘that Golden Creature, blind as brute force, whose very odour ruined the world’, even though, when he does mention her favourite scent, it is the mawkish violet. But her streetwalking counterparts would have wafted headier aromas such as musk or patchouli as olfactory advertisement for their wares.

The association between the putrid puta and her fragrance abuse is embedded in the subconscious perception of perfume, but in 1932, the owner of the Spanish perfume house of Dana went straight to the point when he asked Jean Carles to compose a perfume de puta, a ‘whore’s perfume’ – surely the raunchiest brief in history. He called the orange blossom, carnation and patchouli blend Tabu, the ‘forbidden’ perfume, after Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

Think of it the next time you spritz on a juice called Obsession, Addict, Poison or Aromatics Elixir. You’re not just doing it to smell good: you’re perpetuating a ritual of erotic magic that’s been scaring and enticing men in equal measure for millennia.

8

It wasn’t about the smell back when I was a teenager. It was about the ads.

In my all-girl Catholic private school, my classmates had nicknamed me ‘The Dictionary’ because I used words they didn’t understand. I was an outcast, and magazines were my only access to the stuff they talked about at break, my only clue to becoming a woman. Worse still, my body had declared war on me, growing tall and sprouting fat so quickly I was striped with purple stretch-mark welts all over, and perpetually falling flat on my face because my centre of gravity kept changing location. Not only was I a geek, but I’d become a chubby, bespectacled geek. Fourteen sucked.

My best friend Sylvie was ostracized for the opposite reasons. The other girls called her ‘La Guidoune’, a Québécois slang term for slut. They sniggered at the blowsy D-cup breasts that tugged her blouses open on her greying bra, her rats’-nest hair, occasional bouts of funkiness after gym, and the way she sprawled behind her desk, knees and lips parted, staring at her chipped nail polish. But I envied her the way her breasts rolled and bobbed under her nylon blouses, the boys from the vocational school who hung around a block down to pick her up after class, and even the sovereign vacancy with which she greeted anything that didn’t have to do with beautification. My own mind was a jumble of the things I’d read and was trying to make sense of; my only-child life was boyless, since my freckled next-door neighbour Jeffrey was a hockey-obsessed jock and Jacob, two doors down, was only willing to bond over his pet iguana: I was the sole girl on the block who didn’t run away shrieking when he slid its head into his mouth.

Lunch breaks with Sylvie meant greasy brown vinegar-doused chips bought from a trailer and lengthy browses in Woolworth’s cosmetics aisles. In a burst of teenage rebelliousness, I’d decided to transgress the paternal ban and buy my first bottle of perfume with my babysitting money, a purchase discussed at length with my best friend during break. I’d whittled down my options to three possibilities after studying the ads. The one for Revlon’s Charlie, ‘The Gorgeous, Sexy-Young Fragrance’, featured a grinning model striding confidently in a trouser suit. I rather fancied being a freewheeling career woman with legs a mile long, but Sylvie pulled a face.

‘She looks like that stupid guy on the Johnny Walker bottle.’

With its faux-fur cap, Tigress by Fabergé spoke to my worship of all things feline and reminded me of The Sensuous Woman’s advice on leopard skin-patterned sheets. The ad intrigued me: a gorgeous black woman on all fours wearing a tiger-print body suit and a slight smirk. ‘Tigress. Because men are such animals.’

‘Uh-uh. Get that one.’

Sylvie pointed a frosty-pink nail towards ‘Love’s Baby Soft. Because innocence is sexier than you think.’ Today the ad, a pouting girl clutching a white teddy bear while fully made-up and coiffed though she couldn’t be more than twelve, would have child-protection leagues tear down the offices of Menley & James Laboratories brick by brick. Even back then I found it creepy. I was innocent in body if not in mind: ‘J’ had made sure of that, and the theoretical knowledge she’d imparted fuelled my reveries of teenybopper idols like The Partridge Family’s David Cassidy. Along with Jovan’s Musk, Love’s Baby Soft was the most popular fragrance at school and perhaps the key to some measure of acceptance. As Sylvie wandered off to check out the Revlon display, I pondered buying into what was, in effect, the tribal smell of middle-class teenage girls in the 70s – sweet, powdery, faintly sickly – and wondered just what it was about ‘musk’ they all considered so ‘sexy’. Perhaps I was too ignorant, despite ’J’s best efforts, to know what sexy was. Little did I know I’d stumbled on one of the greatest paradoxes of perfume …

In its natural form, extracted from the abdominal pouch of a species of deer native to the Himalaya named the musk deer, musk smells of honey, tobacco, fur, earth, man, beast … But in its various synthetic guises, it whispers of just-out-of-the-shower freshness, clean laundry and powdered baby bottoms. To sum up: the same word means both ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, ‘innocent’ and ‘sexy’. Of course, clean smells may arouse dirty thoughts … Which was, I suppose, the whole point of Love’s Baby Soft, but a paradox indeed, and one that sprung from centuries of musk madness.

Musk was so popular in Imperial Rome in the 4th century that Saint Jerome had to prohibit his flock from wearing it, which is how we know its use goes back 1,500 years in the West: China had certainly known it for much longer. Moslems thought its scent so divine they incorporated musk pods into the mortar of their mosques so that, once warmed, the walls would exhale their sweet effluvia. Europe rediscovered musk with the Crusades and Marco Polo’s reports from Kublai Khan’s empire. It remained popular until the mid-18th century, then enjoyed a brief revival after the French Revolution: in a counter-reaction against Robespierre’s bloody reign of Virtue, the Royalist Muscadins adopted it as an olfactory emblem – perfume could literally make you lose your head back then. It fell out of favour once more in the 19th century, when it was accused of causing hysteria, but also used to treat ‘sexual torpor’ in women.

However, musk didn’t disappear from perfumers’ armament-aria in the Victorian era. As Septimus Piesse explains in his 1857 Art of Perfumery, ‘It is a fashion of the present day for people to say “that they do not like musk” but, nevertheless, from great experience in one of the largest manufacturing perfumatories in Europe, we are of the opinion that the public taste for musk is as great as any perfumer desires. Those substances containing it always take the preference in ready sale – so long as the vendor takes care to assure his customer “that there is no musk in it”.’

Cheaper synthetics gradually replaced natural musk; in 1979, the musk deer became a protected species, though the use of musk tincture from remaining stocks is not prohibited. Since it’s always been costly, labs have been coming up with substitutes for over a century. None has quite managed to replicate the unique properties of the real thing.

It is because Western fragrance companies started delocalizing the polluting production of some types of synthetic musks to developing countries like India that the fashion for musk reappeared in the West after a two-century eclipse. Hippies may have trekked all the way to the foothills of the Himalaya where the musk deer was poached, but what caught their fancy was entirely man-made. And though the suave odour may have blended well with the effluvia of the Flower Children, it had in fact become the olfactory symbol of cleanliness in the West since the 1950s, when synthetic musks started being added to detergents because they remain stable in harsh environments. Generations have come to identify their smell with freshly washed linen, which is certainly why the so-called ‘white musk’ note has segued so easily from functional to fine perfumery. Perfumers love it too: molecules with such science-fiction names as Galaxolide, Nirvanolide, Serenolide, Cosmone, Astrotone, are capable of boosting other notes, covering up gaps in wonky formulas, expanding their volume and giving them the half-life of plutonium on skin.

I wasn’t any crazier about musk as a teenager than I am now and, in the end, I opted for Tigress in the hope that I would find out some day what it was that turned men into animals … Since my own bottle disappeared decades ago, I’ve asked an American friend to decant a few drops for me from her own vintage stash. I’m on my way to Bertrand’s lab when I retrieve a padded envelope containing her sample from my mailbox. And so it is with him that I catch my first whiff of Tigress in over thirty years.

‘This is what you wore when you were fourteen?’ Bertrand grins.

‘I remember buying it because of the ad …’

We Google it and he lets out a hoot.

‘I can see why! And did you wear it?’

I sniff the blotter. No memories of slumber parties with Sylvie or flashbacks to sniggering classmates aping my ‘French’ accent pop up. All that Tigress brings to mind are the other perfumes its carnation, sweet balms and cheap rose notes remind me of. The masterful 1912 L’Origan by Coty – an olfactory punch in the gut the first time I smelled it four years ago; Tabu by Dana, which had become drugstore swill by the time I acquired my Tigress; Estée Lauder’s iconic Youth Dew, whose spicy facets permeated the ground floor of the local department store of my youth; its descendent Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. I could rebuild just about half the history of perfumery from those few drops of Tigress, but not my teenage years. My olfactory culture seems to have crushed any earlier memories. Have I actually worn this? I’m starting to doubt I even owned it.

Besides, Tigress isn’t the reason that brought me to the lab today. I’ve come because Bertrand has composed what might become the core of our perfume.

‘So … You said you had something to show me?’

‘These aren’t perfumes yet.’

I nod. What Bertrand is showing me today are two sketches for the scent built around orange blossom and an incense we’ve code-named ‘Séville Semaine Sainte’.

I’ve deliberately refrained from trying to envision what I’m about to discover, or even from recalling the smells I experienced in Seville. I don’t know what to expect, or what’s expected of me. I’ve never done this before: never been in on the very first steps of the conception of a fragrance, much less one inspired by me. In exchange for my idea, I’ll be following its development, recording our sessions and writing a journal of our creative journey; I’m also to keep a sample of every version of the formula. How far Bertrand will take the project, I can’t fathom. So far he’s walked his talk: said the story would make a good perfume, said he’d make the perfume, is now making it. For the time being, this is a purely personal undertaking on his part. Of course I can’t help wondering whether it’ll ever come out, but that’s not how things work: perfumers don’t just waltz into a client’s office brandishing a finished product. If the scent comes to term without being marketed, Bertrand will have made me a gift worth several thousand euros, the cost of developing a bespoke perfume for a private client. But this isn’t a bespoke perfume, is it? I’m not asking for an olfactory mirror. I just wanted to walk through the looking glass. And I’m about to.

Bertrand labels his blotters ‘1’ and ‘2’ and dips them into the phials.

‘You’ll find the first one is a lot more austere than the other.’

I breathe in. This is soapy. I can pick out incense … Aldehydes with their characteristic snuffed-candle and citrus … Lavender … Eww, I hate lavender … But I can’t really detect the orange blossom, though Bertrand says he’s boosted its tarry notes with yara-yara, the material I discovered here a while back that reminded me of the medicinal effluvia of my childhood, and indole, a mothball-smelling molecule found in flowers like jasmine, orange blossom, honeysuckle or narcissi.

‘You’ve got to imagine a street in Seville baked by the sun, with the tar almost melting, just before a storm,’ he explains.

‘You got that from the story?’

‘Absolutely.’

I’m a little disconcerted, not only because I don’t remember mentioning any melting tar, much less storms, but because with its soapy lavender notes, I find N°1 jarringly masculine. N°2 is brighter, almost tart, but also softer and more suave. The orange blossom absolute has been fleshed out with jasmine and aurantiol, a base resulting from the reaction of methyl anthranilate (the main odorant molecule of orange blossom) and hydroxycitronellal (which smells of lily-of-the-valley).

But there’s something else lurking beneath the sweetness. Something a little … beastly? The afternoon is uncharacteristically hot and muggy for the end of April and my body feels slightly damp under my black cotton shirtdress. Has my deodorant let me down?

‘Excuse me, I’m about to do something not very ladylike …’

I lift my collar away from my shoulder and take a quick sniff. Bertrand lets out a mischievous little giggle, like a kid who’s played a neat trick on the grown-ups.

‘I’ve put in some costus, to give skin and female scalp effects.’

Costus smells of fur and dirty hair, he explains: force the dose, and you’ll get badly cured sheepskin. Incense is also tricky to work with, since it can produce repulsive facets of raw flesh and butcher’s stall. So he can’t use a high percentage of it and has to boost it with other materials that have incense-like facets, like aldehydes and pink pepper.

I must look a little disappointed – I guess I somehow expected the magic to work straight off. After a moment’s silence, Bertrand speaks up:

‘These are just first drafts. They’re still pretty austere for the moment. I’ve done them to find out where we set the cursor. But we haven’t necessarily found the accord yet.’

N°1 is definitely too soapy, I tell him. There are soap notes in the story wafting from the crowd, but they should be fleeting impressions. And N°2 is too sunny. In my story, the only light comes from the candles flickering on the gold of the float.