The sense of smell is not one that I would claim to be particularly gifted at. I think it's genetic. My mother almost slept through a gas leak once if it wasn't for my father rousing her at 5AM to escape the house in the middle of a freezing January morning. She couldn't smell the mercaptan odor even as it filled the whole house. It wasn't until she saw the smoke that she was convinced of the event. This event occurred before the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when everyone was paranoid about losing their sense of smell. But not my mother, who claims she was simply deficient in this skill.
Some people are capable of recognizing base notes and layering perfumes. Aromas do not form such a complex alphabet for me. In my limited grasp of comprehension, they form into three broad categories: food, nice and bad. Strong smells also give me a headache regardless of which category they belong to. This is why I can't abide fragrance counters or Bath and Body Works. It's all fun and games smelling the little paper tabs until one particular aroma incapacitates your nose and leaves you with a mild headache.
This year, I ventured to get a Pecan Pumpkin Pancake home candle from Bath and Body Works. I smelled the way Hansel and Gretel would have smelled as they were trapped in the confectionery house by the evil witch who intended to cook them. I also accidentally left the candle burning overnight, so when I came back to my apartment, I was assaulted by an aroma best described as a truckload of sugar clawing for passage down my nose and throat. An assortment of bugs and birds waited by my window, wondering what could be so sugary and large, and most importantly, if they could eat it. Even my HVAC system despaired, that surely I had neglected to clean out the particulate filter.
I don’t know how to imagine new smells, I only have smells associated with memory. There's no way to "transfer" an aromatic experience as there might be for words, images or sounds. I also think that language or images in particular are terrible approximations of smell. Like, have you ever read the description of a perfume bottle on a website and been able to understand exactly what smell it means? At least a detergent has the grace to claim to be fresh, clean, minty or summery. Perfumes or colognes are supposed to designate status. Exactly what is the status I am supposed to infer from:
"Mojave Ghost is a woody composition inspired by the soulful beauty of the Mojave Desert. In this xeric wilderness, rare are the plants that dare to blossom. With a light and graceful character top notes of musky Ambrette combine with fresh Jamaican Nesberry. Powdery Violet then unfurls to reveal Sandalwood. Finally warm Chantilly Musk rounds out a base of crisp Amber and Cedar wood, leaving the raw spirit of Mojave Ghost to linger on the skin."
Do I understand what the "raw spirit" of the ghost is meant to convey? Is this a perfume or the synopsis of a dystopian desert drama? How would you even be able to advertise this?
Dior Sauvage tried. The ad features Johnny Depp who quotes poetry about eagles. He is also armed with a guitar and storming an empty desert, presumably in search of a shower, one which has eluded him for many days. There is also a wolf, for unclear purposes. Sometimes, there's a cut montage of the ocean. In some (extremely controversial) cuts, Depp appears to be appropriating elements of Native American life in the desert, such as dancing in traditional costume or sharpening tools by the river. None of these indicate what the perfume is supposed to smell like. My friend says that the perfume is supposed to evoke rugged masculinity. So does gasoline.
Perfume is meant to evoke status. Susan Chefka's essay Base Notes studies how some of the most expensive scents or their constituents hail from the bile, anal glands, vomit and sweat of creatures that have been abused and exploited. Most have been endangered enough for many organizations to pivot to synthetic substitutes. These creatures will never feature on a perfume advertisement, and the processes of collecting the scent may very well never be discussed in the spaces that such perfumes grace. Perfumes have also, in a strange way, come to represent parts of the world that have been marginalized as well. There are "Oriental" scents, which are meant to invoke geographies. Very rarely is a perfume something that actually smells like the thing in nature – sailors do not have a perfume that smells of salt spray, chefs do not have perfumes that make them smell of fried onions (delicious and simultaneously, questionable).
Since memory is the only way I index smell, and my memory is in far better capacity than my olfactory sensitivity, I always find emotional attachment when I think of smell. My mother's clothes have a distinctive smell, even after they've been accidentally washed in my laundry with my clothes. Nobody else in my family, including my mother, can smell this distinction. I wonder if that is a somatic response, some deep evolutionary circuitry that instantly allows me to feel safe around her. What could I smell like if I asked the people who love me to characterize their scent for me in a bottle?
There’s other ways in which the memory of smell haunts me. I am attracted to men who smell nice on our dates, and there are partners in my history whose scents have haunted me for months after their departure. These are people of consequence to me, and their scent will forever be attached to their memory.
Maybe this is what they're trying to sell. The idea that a smell can become part of your expression out into the world. At some point in my youth I was sold on the nonsensical concept that a self-assured young woman must have a distinctive smell about herself as part of her identity. As you can see, this was clearly propaganda by Big Smell. But it was also the stuff of romantic poems, the thing you could be yearned by. To be remembered through scent was to be remembered via mystery, and I craved that feeling of enigma because I thought it would render me desirable. So I invested in a bottle of Estée Lauder's Modern Muse and used it every day, even before my 8:30AM classes.
To everyone else, I must (should?) have smelled like "an alluring contrast of sparkling florals and sleek, sensual woods." But I remember that scent as a woman desperately trying to be something half-formed. At three spritzes a day, it was going to last me years, but I hoped that the association would stick. That the status I wanted –of being a modern muse– would be derived from the scent itself. Once someone I had a crush on told me he could tell when I had left for class because my scent still lingered in the carpeted corridor after I'd left the building. I was giddy in the scent of the Modern Muse, because I finally had proof it worked.
Then, the Modern Muse was reformulated. Three other variants were spawned, none of which smelled like my half-formed concept of a mystery. I found Tokyo Milk's Poison Apple and it made me smell like the 13th witch who wasn't invited to Sleeping Beauty's birthday party and therefore prepared to administer a curse. I was so obsessed with Poison Apple that I would even spray it on before going to bed and sleep in the scent. Because I loved it so much, it was discontinued. Then, I began to hoard the gender-neutral Bergamot by Commodity, which is for workaholics whose co-workers have floral allergies and that flew off production two weeks after I bought my first bottle. I could not escape the metaphor even if I wanted to.
Then we all wore masks for two years, and for a while, nobody cared to smell of anything. Not even mystery, identity, hope, desirability, self-assured or even self-contained.
My current perfume is Melrose Place by Ouai. This is also the dominant fragrance of their shampoo, and I thought it would simply augment the scent already in my hair. It is dwindling. I don't know if I find it staying on me long enough to become my identity, let alone become a Smell I Can Be Identified By. I find it funny that a perfume is still one of those things I have to randomly stick my nose out for.
My most favorite perfume ad is New World by Kenzo. The video, which is a masterful and very relatable work, shows the talented Margaret Qualley at a gala hosted at a museum. Qualley breaks apart from the crowd, holds eye contact with the camera for four seconds, and then begins a glorious and chaotic rampage all over the museum. She transforms from respectable gala guest, from a woman of status, to a chaotic spider running amok between galleries, making imaginary villains of the exhibits and generally crawling around to the beat.
Traditionally, most perfume ads would show how such a woman attracts attention to herself through her scent. But I love Kenzo for leaning into the ridiculousness of a perfume ad. Not only is she upsetting the status quo of famous contemporaneous perfume ads (like Lancôme’s La Vie est Belle), but also she is simply having a good time filming this ad. The exclusive status and approach that she evokes is that of a hyperactive child allowed to run around unsupervised at a large museum. I don't know if the New World perfume actually smells of this exact emotion, but maybe this is all the comprehension and identity I require from a scent. Maybe this is who I have become now.