I grew up believing that eros ignites at a distance. That chasing is more gratifying than possessing. This is especially true in a consumerist society that would have us believe that the act of shopping for something is better than owning it. In a culture that mediates desire through store display windows and swiping screens, where the packaging is more important than the product, we are trained to objectify what we want and reduce everything to porn: food porn, travel porn, trauma porn, porn-porn. Our hungry and restless eyes provide the measure of our wants, and they are always bigger than what we can consume. Yet, strangely enough, it was within this panorama of consumer goods where I spied that which could subvert its visual logic. Despite being introduced to me as a staple commodity in a woman’s arsenal of seduction, one oft advertised with taut young bodies and come-hither gazes, it was perfume that became my remedy for the excesses of our graphic appetites.
I have always been drawn to perfumes despite modern society’s tendency to privilege visual pleasure. Like many, my first exposure to fragrance was through my parents; I ascribe my penchant for bitchy green chypres to my mother’s love for vintage Miss Dior, the perfect aldehyde-edged complement to her power stilettos and signature cat-eyes. I also took to collecting essential oils as a teen, falling in love with them in all their multi-sensory glory: the banana neon glow of ylang ylang, the dark velveteen caress of clove bud, the mellow French horn solo of geranium.
We come to rely less upon scent as we age out of infancy, and I was no different. My life was, and remains, dictated by sight: the brute technical power of the scientific lens and digital screens; the panopticons of online surveillance and the male gaze; my education in the visual arts and cinema. Yet despite being taught that distance and disconnection are necessary preconditions for objectivity and truth, I never relinquished my faith in the proximity and intimacy of smelling things. Where a photograph submits evidence, a fragrance gives testimony. I simply did not outgrow my assent to instinct, to the certainty of being overcome with the scent of something or someone you love, to all the immeasurable associations, memories and emotions that a perfume can invoke. Because if I am doing it right I should be able to top you with my eyes closed. Anyone can pull a face and feign a look of arousal, but you cannot fake the way your lust smells.
This isn’t an attempt to deny the attractive power of the image or to reduce visual pleasure to a modern ill. After all, we have been falling in love at first sight throughout history. We’ve long known distance makes the heart grow fonder; we’ve always wanted what we cannot have. Yet there is something distinctly modern and oppressive about our obsession with image today.
Much has been written about the flattening of modern culture into an all-surround surface of impenetrable visual signifiers; consider Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament, Guy Debord’s spectacle, Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra. What these theories share in common is how the act of looking in modern societies has not delivered on its promise of enlightenment. Instead, sight has become torqued by the alienation of capitalism, where images desacralise our world and estrange us from it, manufacture within us consumer desires and political fervour.
Decades after these philosophers analysed our modern heap of broken images, our scopophilia has gone into hyperdrive. Today, we live in an infinite scroll of visual signifiers such that many of us now feel bereft without the weight of constantly being seen by others online. Perfume, on the other hand, beckons us into a different world with different desires.
The world of perfume is one that remembers the power and the pleasures of remaining unseen. It is not concerned with modern epistemic demands, nor is it one that can be so easily objectified and weaponised against us. Where image is fact or forgery, perfume is fantasy. It beckons us to slow down, come closer, and inhale. In the kingdom of olfaction, we are invited to resist the harms of modern visual culture and defy scientific scrutiny and reductionism.
If erotics are mysterious to the modern subject, the scent remains equally so. Scientists still do not fully understand how smell works, aside from a crude model of odour molecules activating olfactory receptors. These receptors make up the most diverse kind of sensory cells, and are actually found throughout the human body, including our skin, heart, guts and, incidentally, the testes. It is no accident that our most poorly understood sense is paired with a sensory object that is formless, soundless and immaterial. It’s difficult to understand perception when that which is perceived can so easily resist being recorded or replicated.
It’s this not-an-object-objectness that gives perfume its paradoxical nature. Even when you are smelling perfume, you don’t actually have it. You can’t see it, hear it or hold it. Whatever you’re smelling is a fleeting, ever-shifting, labile combination of volatile aroma chemicals breaking down with light, heat and time at a rate you cannot control. From the second you spray your skin with your favourite perfume, it – and everything it means to you that you can’t quite put into words – is already evaporating away.
This is what I enjoy so much about perfume: its evasiveness. It is both singularly specific, yet oddly empty. We tend to emphasise its former quality; it seems for most that a fragrance’s most striking characteristic is how tied it is to precise personal memories. Calvin Klein’s CK One, for example, doesn’t just smell like sheer green citrus with luminous hedione and the Gaussian blur of Iso E Super. It smells like my friend’s gothy bedroom and sitting beside her with her razor-edged Pulp Fiction bob and chipped nail polish, rolling her first, badly packed little pinner of a joint. But CK One smells like so much more than that. Perfumes have an inexhaustible quality; like the symbols of infinity in Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Aleph’ and ‘The Zahir,’ we find all things in perfume and it becomes all things. CK One reaches beyond my personal history to capture my imaginary reconstruction of an entire decade and what I want that decade to mean. In one spray there is the androgynous, grunge flannel and oily, smeared black eyeliner of a generation; stewing teen angst, lust and boredom unleashed in sweaty mosh pits; feeling ungovernable and feral, careening through life with our middle fingers collectively raised to the job security we’d never have, the gender norms we’d never capitulate to, the looming spectres of AIDS, globalisation and a future climate collapse.
I’m not one for ruminating over personal memories. so it’s this ability for perfume to be everything everywhere all at once that excites me. Perfume’s semiotic emptiness allows the subject to liberate excess libido, dissolving linguistic forms and norms that usually constrict imagination and meaning. Nothing amuses me so much as absurd, cheesy and florid perfume ad copy, the prose of would-be poets loosening their corporate straightjackets. ‘A silent monolith, the last vestige of a stone circle whose meaning has been lost to time’ (Aesop’s Ouranon, a spicy wood). ‘An ode to the many-selved you that is always, forever, a story unfolding’ (Byredo’s Animalique, a powdery suede). ‘A perfume that speaks of the fire-god of Persia and the gods of India, the worship of offerings, Mesopotamia, milk and clarified butter to honor the gods. And to remember, by a wake in the air, the foaming whiteness of the soul that comes from everything’ (Etat Libre d’Orange’s Soul of My Soul, a rich vanilla). Many-selved stone circles and foamy souls that unfold, always, forever, god, why not?
Why shouldn’t Amouage’s Myths Woman, a chilly green and aqueous floral, remind me of an indefatigable young widow who has survived war and occupation by her resourceful cunning and iron wit, now caught in a rare, pensive moment, alone and vulnerable? Or perhaps she’s an unsmiling, cold-blooded siren luring strange men to sleep forever in her murky waters. Or maybe it’s a faded Impressionist portrait of an androgynous figure, their sombre, enigmatic expression shaded in with daubs of bruised mauves and pale jades. I could let my imagination carry me simultaneously deeper into and away from a scent like this, or I could permit someone else to do that for me. When I spray Zoologist’s Tyrannosaurus Rex, instead of an abstract combination of potent spices, florals, resins and smoke, I am transported into an incandescent burning hellscape of acrid funnels of burning creosote, oozing magma and fleshy, primordial blooms – all these associations no doubt influenced by the perfume’s name and its marketing description, which references a Cretaceous apocalypse. Our highly suggestible noses will sniff out what we want to believe is there, and wed this to what we desire.
In this way, perfume reminds me of the fetish or transitional object in the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition wherein developing children rely on an external object to navigate their relationship to an imaginary, unitary state of jouissance, an experience of excess pleasure that triggers a child’s ambivalence and is projected onto the body of the mother. If that seems like a stretch, then suffice it to say that many people go through life feeling as though something is missing though they’re not exactly sure what, and that these people might feel a powerful drive to seek something that they hope will give them the satiation of having their desires perfectly met, or at least temporarily forget this feeling of incompleteness.
Perhaps the man who understands perfume and jouissance the most is Serge Lutens, whose eponymous fragrance house has been a long-standing favourite of niche perfume lovers. In interviews, Lutens frequently describes his perfumes as a means to reconnect with his mother, from whom he was separated at an early age. ‘Beauty is an ultimate truth … the only way I can make myself whole is through this woman: I atone by the beauty I give to her … I am her greatest defender and advocate.’ But make no mistake, Lutens knows he is not being literal; he recognises the paradox inherent in his pursuit of the Lutens woman, noting that ‘the other, in this case the true mother, is absence, which is also her
presence.’
Perhaps this is why Lutens’ vintage soliflore perfumes summon for me the ultimate, archetypal expression of so many flowers. As picky as I can be when it comes to soliflores, I find his vintages captivating. They bring to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s chilly, unattainable leading blondes. But instead of being subject to the director’s misogynistic cruelty – Tippi Hedren being pecked by projectile pigeons over five days or Janet Leigh getting unceremoniously offed while showering – Lutens’ perfumes are reverential.
We have the mentholated, narcotic opening of Lutens’ Tubereuse Criminelle, a perfume that captures tuberose in all its complex facets – rubber, cream, leather – and flirts with sinister territory while its base softens into vanilla and musk. His Iris Silver Mist is deserving of its legendary status, embalming you in buttery layers of silky cold cream that is at turns suggestive of powder and incense ash, roots and earth, fat and musk. Or we have the aching purity of A La Nuit, which perfectly balances jasmine between heady, rich, fresh and sweet, a Platonic form of a flower. It even comes with its own profuse description as well: ‘White jasmine is the sleepwalker who climbs the walls of her milky way, opening her calyces to catch the breeze that will whisk her to the stars.’ Don’t assume that perfection is a dead and static thing. It is alive in the moment, trembling over the edges. It can be surreal or ridiculous. It might make you smile.
Yet even as I have taken my pleasure in so many perfumes, even as they continue to beguile me years after having first encountered them, I’m still seeking. I want to believe that there is more perfection to be had. For I am both greedy and disciplined enough to be willing to continually subject myself to that which is poorly executed, blandly commercial, and unimaginatively derivative in order to discover the next perfume that will absolutely send me.
I suppose the question now is, where exactly does a good perfume send me? I’m not sure what to call this place that escapes me even as I dwell in it. What I can say is that if scent is a signifier, and a signifier is part of a chain as many a linguist has suggested, then perfume is a string of prayer beads. It is one thing that leads to another, and another, and another until, if you can finesse the right combination of perfume, practice and prostration, you will have somehow made a connection to that which lies beyond all signification: a supplication, a covenant, a rapture. If the Madonna is an icon, perfume is a catholicon. Your sightless longing presence before the promise of the divine.