I don't find it necessary to recount a biographical explanation of Why I Became Interested in Perfume (they all go about the same way - I had an idea of what perfume is like, but one time, in my youth, I smelled a bottle of something that surprised me in a way that I had never been surprised before). (That or younger people going through a fin de siècle phase tend to get into serious fragrance by way of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, a franchise that pairs descriptions like "This is the perfume of the humanist and inventor, electric with caprice: clove, mastic, and spikenard..." with fragrances that range from a swampy, poorly-worked-out mess to something truly interesting). Later I moved on to making special trips to the Sephora upstate with the determination of a Hollywood archaeologist; or going to the perfume counter at the mall and trying the rather romantic advice to ask for "something that is like nothing else." (My recommendation, by the way, was "Look, you have to tell me if you're trying to find a present for your girlfriend, or your mother, or?" from a woman gesturing impatiently to the tray of Justin Bieber's "Someday".)
But that's not the most compelling part of the story, at least not to me.
I don't know if this common among people, or common among people with my particular collection of neuroses, but I need art as the vector through which I feel. (For example: I don't cry naturally, as a man, or as the consequence of a cold and violent upbringing which is my life's work to recover from, or whatever, and whenever I start to feel as if I might be a complete sociopath - I currently work in healthcare and if you're stoic by nature that's a question you'll be asking yourself a lot - I watch the Valse triste short from the animated film, Allegro non troppo. Without fail, it makes me cry. It's childish, but somehow, this is fitting.)
The consequence of this is that throughout my life I've always had the dangerous compulsion to ask more of art than it could provide, and after scouring an art form for the most intense experience and finding nothing that could truly satisfy me, I become interested in creating that kind of art myself, and then somehow, all of a sudden, lose all interest in the entire medium. There's very little in the arts that I can truly enjoy. I spent many years involved in cinema, working in the film industry to some capacity and writing film reviews and cinematography under a pseudonym - and also, many years reading articles on things like "The Top Ten Most Beautiful Films" or searching forums for "saddest movies" or sometimes "the most disturbing" - and now, I can't sit through a picture more than once or twice a year, if that. I used to say every once in a while that I'd cycle through all the arts until I moved onto the sciences, and then onto religion, and then on to pure math; and once I got tired of pure math I'd become a drug addict if I didn't kill myself.
Essentially, what I wanted was to feel like a human being. At the same time, I can compare it to something religious in nature. I can't draw the line in a way that's clear to me, but the feeling I looked for in the cinema is the same feeling I got when I go out into the woods in the summer when it rains.
It is not always summer, and it does not always rain.
This is completely the opposite of the common impression of perfume - for the wealthy and shallow - but the earthiness of scent appealed to me. Of all the senses, smell is the most primitive and least understood. (We have no idea how smell works, only a few competing theories which seem to get it mostly right.) Once the scent is cultivated, you achieve a certain animal sense of space. The same suburban street you've been on a thousand times will change daily, and even by the hour. As a person who was raised in the hills, I have a memory of going to New York City to see a band and sensing all of a sudden that the air smelled real and right, realizing later that I was a few blocks off from Central Park.
In the aesthetic sense, my interest in perfumes waxed and waned. As I'm wont to do, I became fascinated by the idea of intensely sorrowful scents. This isn't some special pathology of mine - if you ask someone who cares about the art what the saddest fragrances are, they'll know exactly what you mean. L'heure bleue ("the blue hour") is mentioned a lot (and smells exactly like what it says on the tin) [blue musk]. L’Air du desert marocain smells like the later parts of The Little Prince [dry amber and resin]. Gris Clair smells like the darkest parts of early morning in a place of fog and wet clay [iris]. Apres l’Ondee I only smelled once and I’ll never forget it. I had such a strong image of a rain shower in spring, early morning, tears … I could even see the light of a sun shower in my mind, one on this very specific time and season and day. This sounds like a metaphor, but it isn’t, it’s the true ability of this fragrance to tap into something unspoken and paint a picture in an abstract way. [This perfume is so well-composed I can't pick out any contributing notes - which is what they call the individual scents, such as vanilla, or rose, that make up the formula - and have to resort to general terms like "floral" and "green."]
Still, it wasn't exactly the same, and desperately, I kept seeking rain. I had a collection of artificial fragrance chemicals, essential oils, and extracts of herbs, resins, and flowers in my basement (and got almost nowhere with this complex and frustrating art). I bought perfume samples and aftermarket decants by the millimeter, searching. And every once in a while I found something I simply liked to wear, and managed a full-sized bottle.
The mania subsided like it always does, but the simple cultural pressure of fragrance as an accessory remained. Instead of leaving me disappointed, my passion and my fascination was able to simply relax. It had been lowered to the realms of the everyday ("the everyday" or "day-to-day life" being treated sometimes as something like a damaging property in my heritage language, Russian), but it was a sustainable love, in an acceptable frame. Sometimes I hardly think about it, and other times I want to smell something that'll surprise me again, like the first time. Maybe it had something to do with its nature, and maybe it had something to do with growing maturity on my part that happened to temporally coincide with my latest obsession. But fragrance was the first art that I was able to truly enjoy. Some time after that, I started reading again, and drawing and painting for the sheer pleasure of the craft, which I hadn't done in almost ten years. Something workmanlike came over me.
I think I ought to leave you now with Luca Turin again, who's done some of the best and most famous pieces of perfume journalism in the world (or at least my personal favorites):
During the writing of this guide, both authors felt at regular intervals a need to recalibrate their olfactory apparatus to obtain both a reliable zero (Creed’s Love in White will do fine) and a full-scale quality reading. The latter can be achieved using almost any one of the old Guerlains, but I find Vol de Nuit is best for calibration purposes because it embodies pure excellence in raw materials and, to me, little else, thereby ensuring that my judgment is not clouded by emotional associations. In truth, VdN (Night Flight), released two years after its namesake—Saint-Exupéry’s superb 1931 novel about mail flights to South America—is by Guerlain standards a somewhat shapeless perfume, lacking a legible structure. But it gives me the pleasure, the tickle of anticipation, the feeling of unobstructed space and pinpoint clarity I get when I settle into my seat at an orchestral concert and hear the players practicing. Almost all other fragrances, when compared with VdN, sound like they’re being played through the sort of radio people hold up to their ear not to miss the ballgame. God bless Guerlain for still doing this stuff.
Turin, Luca; Tania Sanchez. Perfumes: The A-Z Guide (p. 357). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.
And if that doesn't make you want to try some on, nothing will.
