November 20, 2008
That Smells
Why are there not more connoisseurs of smell, or, more specifically, “Why is great perfume not taken more seriously?”
One reason why truly great smells are so often undervalued is that they are today made and distributed under the not particularly watchful gaze of a few large corporations. The cynical bean-counters in Paris and Zurich do not hesitate to tamper with old formulas, insisting on the substitution of cheap chemical compounds that approximately resemble rarer, better ingredients in an effort to reduce the dizzying cost and increase profits. They do not tell their customers when or how they do this, indeed they presume we won’t notice the difference, so fine perfume is now hopelessly entangled with the international cosmetic dollar, and ill-served by marketing and public relations. It is also manacled to crude presumptions about what is acceptably feminine or credibly masculine.
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“Lena smells really good when she comes in from the cold,” I wrote last night. “It’s almost not a smell.”
That led to a riff on the theme of ‘a faint whiff of nothing much’.
A conversation about things that smelled the same as Lena — or ‘didn’t smell’ the same — that smelled strongly of nothing.
And I love Luca Turin’s assessment of No. 5 — which is the fragrance to which I return time and time again. It’s how you’ll know it’s me. “Like a sleepy panther”. I love it.
(Valentina’s “My Own”, which exists today only in the form of a recreation, is another great fragrance, so sez me.)