Commie Couture

 

Jing Daily, which alleges to be all about “the business of luxury in China,” has a recent piece on China’s “patriotic perfume boom.” The story condescendingly puts Western fragrance brands on notice while promoting the new hotness: Guochao, which means “Chinese heritage hip.”

Long gone are the days when established global brands could simply crack the Chinese market with a French label and a cliché image portraying an actress wearing the scent during a night walk in Paris. In a market that is increasingly being dominated by up-and-coming Chinese brands, Guochao-themed shopping festivals, and openly patriotic influencers, international perfume houses can no longer claim to be the authoritative gatekeepers of refined taste.

Uh oh. Sounds like trouble for Chanel and Estée Lauder and all the other mega-brands that want to slurp down that sweet, sweet ChiComm money.

Guochao brands are increasingly turning toward local lifestyles for inspiration.

Well, fair enough! Maybe we can help. We locked the FirstNerve marketing team into a windowless conference room and had them brainstorm new Guochao fragrance concepts. Here’s what they came up with:

Kowtow by Lebron James. A sports cologne from the hoops legend himself.

Slave to Love by the Uyghur Autonomy Region Committee. A people, a place, an attitude.

BSL No. 4 by Shi Zhengli. Die Fledermaus turned into a Chinese opera and captured in a bottle.

Lie Flat. The effortless fragrance for slackers.

Deep Cover by Tang Juan. Your scent, your secret.

Kowloon Memories. The scent of freedom fading in the wind.

1989 Chang’an Avenue. Feel the power, fight the force.

Honey Pot, the alluring new scent from Fang Fang.

The Memory Meme that Refuses to Die

 

A reader’s letter to the Financial Times relates a charming story about her son, who as a two-year-old blurted out that a lady in a store smelled like his godmother. Lo and behold, both women wore L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain.

Thirty-one years later, he pulls the same stunt at a restaurant: he correctly identifies his godmother’s signature scent on a lady sitting at the next table.

The letter writer thought she was illustrating a point made in a previous edition of the paper, namely “wouldn’t it be a fine thing if there was a good smell that reminded people of you?” In fact, she did so quite effectively. We can also applaud her son for having a good nose, a keen awareness of scent, and a long memory.

But why did the FT have to spoil it all by slugging the letter “The power of scent is like a Proustian madeleine”? There is nothing Proustian about this anecdote. The first incident shows a toddler with a precocious awareness of smell. The second shows that as an adult he retains his smell identification ability, along with a good memory.

In neither instance was he transported to a full-blown evocation of an earlier time and place—whether by the instantaneous, effortless process described by many pre-Proustian writers, or by the slow, labored process described by Proust in Swann’s Way.

My guess is that some junior editorial assistant probably read French Literature at Cambridge and simply couldn’t resist justifying all that tuition money by working in a Proust reference.

Basta. In the interest of accuracy and history, isn't it time we begin to forget Proust’s madeleine?

Perfume Platitudes: Paging Crash Davis

 

The first law of fragrance marketing requires that every smellebrity introducing a perfume attest to a personal role in its creation.

The legendary Dolly Parton, now launching her first scent—Dolly: Scent from Above—has complied with tradition and issued the correct formulaic statement:

“I felt like a mad scientist trying to find the right combination, but we did and it took us about two years.”

Regarding her decision to enter the beauty business, she is also quoted as saying:

“I’m going to start with perfume. Everybody has always told me how good I smell.”

Wut? That sounds like an enormous non sequitur. But then we note this on her website:

“The truth is, I have been blending my own scent for years. It’s a combination of bath oils, powders and perfumes that have become my “signature” and is known everywhere I go. It’s time for me to share this with you. I hope you enjoy!”

IFRA? I don’t need no stinkin’ IFRA!

FirstNerve is inclined to award Ms. Parton a honorary Mad Scientist degree for her fearless personal efforts at blending.

Meanwhile Iggy Azalea reaches back to her long-neglected Australian roots (she grew up in Mullumbimby, NSW) in making the de rigueur claim of personal involvement in the creation of her new fragrance: 

Iggy said she was inspired by Australian native flora when concocting the aroma.

Apparently Australian sandalwood is a top note in Devil’s Advocate. [Top note?—Ed.] [Whatev. Just go with the flow.]

Perfume and Big Data: Garbage In, Garbage Out

 A new “big data” study of perfume has been making a splash the past couple of weeks. Titled “Social success of perfumes,” it was published in PLoS ONE on July 4. It’s another in the recent genre of throwing abstruse mathematics at the sense of smell.

The authors, Vaiva Vasiliauskaite and Tim S. Evans, are in the physics department at Imperial College London, more specifically the Theoretical Physics Group and Centre for Complexity Science. [Awesome nameage!—Ed.] Vasiliauskaite is a graduate student and apparently a talented nerd, having graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in Theoretical Physics. Evans is a Senior Lecturer.

Here’s the abstract of their paper:

We study data on perfumes and their odour descriptors—notes—to understand how note compositions, called accords, influence successful fragrance formulas. We obtain accords which tend to be present in perfumes that receive significantly more customer ratings. Our findings show that the most popular notes and the most over-represented accords are different to those that have the strongest effect to the perfume ratings. We also used network centrality to understand which notes have the highest potential to enhance note compositions. We find that large degree notes, such as musk and vanilla as well as generically-named notes, e.g. floral notes, are amongst the notes that enhance accords the most. This work presents a framework which would be a timely tool for perfumers to explore a multidimensional space of scent compositions.

Leaving aside the technical terms “network centrality” and “large degree notes,” the claims in the abstract seem clear: the authors have identified odor descriptors that drive the commercial success of specific perfume formulations. Sounds interesting and useful. One dives eagerly into the paper to find the details.

That’s where the problems start.

No actual perfumes were smelled in the making of this study. Nor were any actual perfume formulations examined. Instead, the authors apparently scraped perfume description and ranking data from a website, cleaned it up a bit, and then proceeded to slice, dice, and theorize.

I say “apparently” because nowhere in the paper do they describe where or how they obtained their data. I imagine my amateur readers stammering, “B-b-b-but, don’t scientists have to describe their data?” Yeah, well, uh, no, I guess not.

From clues in the text (e.g., perfumes rated on a five-point scale), Vasiliauskaite and Evans may have tapped Fragrantica.com as their source. In which case, they might have been courteous enough to give the site’s proprietors a shout-out. Or, better yet, have obtained permission to use the site’s data.

Of greater ethical concern is the absence of the source data in a supplemental file or online scientific archive. Making the data available is a requirement of publication in PLoS ONE.

PLOS journals require authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction at the time of publication.

I don’t understand how this basic requirement could have been overlooked by the reviewers or the paper’s editor, Yongli Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China.

So, let’s look again at the abstract. By “successful fragrance formulas” the authors mean perfume brands with a large number of user reviews and high ratings on an undisclosed fragrance website. By “notes” and “odor descriptors” they mean descriptors provided by anonymous reviewers of undetermined skill level and/or marketing verbiage lifted from advertisements and promotional copy. On Fragrantia.com, gauzy words like “honey,” “amber” and “musk”—which refer to no one specific perfumery material—are given equal weight with clary sage, tonka bean, and oakmoss (see, for example, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme). By “accords” the authors appear to mean co-occurring “notes” on a webpage.

Other passages make one wonder if the authors know what they’re talking about. Take this paragraph, for example:

Information of the precise amounts of each ingredient in the formulation of a perfume is confidential, to prevent duplications of the formula. However, the list of ingredients, the list of notes, is often advertised in order to describe the scent of a perfume. Thus a perfume which smells of rose, vanilla and musk, is described using such notes. In this study we have analysed the notes which make up over ten thousand perfumes without knowing anything about their specific amounts in each perfume. We assume that a note is included in the perfume description as its presence enriches the composition and its smell is detectable.

This paragraph is confused to the point of idiocy. A perfume’s list of ingredients is never revealed, much less advertised. What is publicly promoted by the brand is a short list of note names meant to imply romance, exotic origins, and high quality as much as what the perfume smells like. Even then, it’s unclear whether the “notes” used in this study were provided by the brand or plucked from the website’s crowd-sourced reviews. The authors “have analysed the notes which make up over ten thousand perfumes”? Fairer to say they’ve analyzed notes attributed to perfumes (by persons unknown) that may or may not include all the salient notes in a given perfume. The stated assumption that each note in a description is individually “detectable” is ridiculous. Do the authors believe that the grapefruit and Calabrian bergamot in Coco Noir are individually detectable? One wonders how much smelling they’ve ever done.

At this point it’s clear that no matter how much “network” and “non-network” statistical analysis they apply to this slop bucket of data, the results will lack specificity and insight. For all of its nodes, edges, weighted network representations, permutation tests, d-scores, and one-mode projections, the study doesn’t make much contact with the commercial or sensory realities of perfumery. It could have been interesting as an analysis of brand attributes seen through social media. But even there it fails.

This paper isn’t worth the time it takes to download.

UPDATE September 19, 2019
Called it! The paper has now been retracted by PLoS ONE.

The study discussed here is “Social success of perfumes,” by Vaiva Vasiliauskaite and Tim S. Evans, PLoS ONE 14(7): e0218664.

How Nick Zollicker Came to Be

I join Luke Clancy on his Culture File podcast to talk about Nick Zollicker, the protagonist of my new “smell stories.”

FN Review: Mandy Aftel, Drunk with Scent

 Mandy Aftel has hit another one out of the park. After scoring with Essence and Alchemy, she drills one into the upper decks with Fragrant: The secret life of scent. Her new book is built around five raw materials of natural perfumery: cinnamon, mint, frankincense, ambergis, and jasmine. Chapter by chapter she shares her working knowledge of the individual materials and places each one in historical and cultural context. We learn how to use them (guided practical formulations are provided) but we also learn about Mandy: her approach to life, meaning, and creativity. We discover her amazingly vibrant aesthetic, and how it grew naturally (so to speak) from her Berkeley environs. It is artisanal and whimsical. It takes pleasure in the simple deeply observed. It focuses on the quality of raw materials and the authenticity with which they are experienced. Think Bernard Maybeck and Alice Waters.

In each chapter, Mandy effortlessly transitions from an emotional and intellectual immersion in scent to the practical means of buying, sampling, and blending essential oils. Her personal fragrance fantasy land is a Peaceable Kingdom—in one category of scent after another she steers away from the sharp and overpowering and favors materials with softer impressions that lend themselves to blending.

Mandy imbibes the cultural and historical emanations of scent as enthusiastically as she inhales the essential oils themselves. She seeks out exotic materials and rare perfumery books with the same thirst for experience. As a scent scientist and fellow bibliophile, I appreciate this and applaud it, even as my personal interest in the intellectual history of smell leans more to philosophical treatises and natural history than to the formula books and practical guides that Mandy favors. But this is a matter of taste.

The real difference between Mandy and me is one of temperament. For her, enthusiasm and passion drive creativity. For me, the search for pattern and motive compels description, quantification, and analysis. My joy comes from tracing a new regularity of behavior or revealing an unsuspected piece of natural history. Hers comes from arranging a beautiful experience for others to share.

Does the way of the scientist not involve creativity and inspiration? Of course it does. Does the way of the perfumer not involve measurement and precision? Of course. But where Mandy revels in mystery, historical echoes and parallels, I thrill to clarifying the underlying psychobiology of sensory experience.

Throughout human experience, the allure of ephemeral smells and flavors was potent enough to change the course of history. Mandy vividly describes how the discovery of scents and spices drove early Europeans to take great risks in exploration, trade, and warfare. Not that she would put it this way, but the history of spice and perfume is inseparable from the development of capitalism. To celebrate one is to celebrate the other. No wonder the social frivolity of scent and perfumery’s exploitation of natural resources have been favorite targets for leftists and greens. Mandy’s Berkeley-based aesthetic sits uneasily on this cultural fault-line.

Mandy is an exponent of “authentic luxury” which she defines as psychological engagement with the honest immediacy of sensory experience. In this, she aligns herself with locavorism and Alice Waters’ Slow Food movement. I, too, encourage people to expand their sensory horizons, to stop and savor the world around them. But mindful cultivation of one’s sensory experience is a stone’s throw from fatuity. Those who can afford it thrill to the localness of their salad greens and grilled lamb. Those in a lower tax bracket can be seen across the street from Chez Panisse, waiting in line for pizza at The Cheese Board Collective. For them, the forty-minute wait isn’t a hindrance (few people in Berkeley are deadline-driven); rather, it serves to authenticate the sensory superiority of their pizza experience. Here is the Cheese Board’s pizza offering for tomorrow (the day of Fragrant’s publication): Crimini mushrooms, onion, mozzarella and Campo de Montalban cheese, arugula (Heirloom Organic Garden of Hollister) in a lemon dressing. Mr. Dino, my local purveyor of finest quality pizza back in New Jersey, would consider a forty-minute wait a failure of customer service, as would his deadline driven customers. Heirloom organic arugula would elicit from Mr. Dino a blank stare.

Throughout Fragrant, Mandy celebrates the act of discrimination, the exercise of a knowledgeable palate upon selected raw materials of experience. Training one’s nose (and brain) to find the nuanced differences in a series of ambergris samples can be revelatory; learning how to blend ambergris with other materials can, as Mandy illustrates, be a creative project akin to learning how to paint in water colors. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether for every talented Mandy Aftel there are ten Randy Marshes finishing every dish “with a little crème fraîche.”

Mandy’s facility in reading character is the talent of the clinical psychologist, one she re-deploys with respect to scent: she listens to how an oil presents itself and how it reacts with others. In her fascination with the symbology of scent, the meanings of its folklore and myths, Mandy takes as her aesthetic scope the entire scented world and our experience of it—human involvement with fragrance from prehistory onward. Her aesthetic compromises, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “the whole of harmonium.” She is the world’s first Jungian Perfumer.

Preferred Fragrance Inc.’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad October

FirstNerve has long followed the saga of Preferred Fragrance, the New York company that attracts trademark lawsuits like a discarded fish head attracts flies. On October 18, Prada S.A. filed a federal complaint charging that Preferred’s Party Candy perfume infringed on Prada Candy, a perfume launched in the U.S. back in August, 2011. Specifically, Prada charges Preferred with

trademark and trade dress infringement, unfair competition, deceptive trade practices, and trademark and trade dress dilution.

Prada claims that the similarity in name and packaging between Prada Candy and Party Candy

is calculated to confuse and mislead consumers, create a false impression as to the source and sponsorship of Party Candy, to divert business from [Prada], to pass off the Party Candy product as being authorized and endorsed by [Prada], or to otherwise falsely misrepresent the nature and quality of [Preferred’s] product and misappropriate the goodwill associated with the Prada Candy mark and trade dress.

For marketers of look-alike products, trademark infringement lawsuits might be seen as just a cost of doing business. Preferred Fragrance certainly has plenty of experience defending itself against such charges and may fight this one to a draw—i.e., a negotiated settlement that falls short of what Prada seeks, namely that Preferred stop manufacturing and marketing Party Candy and cough up all profits from the product along with treble damages.

Perhaps more consequential than the Prada lawsuit is one filed a week earlier, also in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs in this case are the private equity investors who bought Preferred Fragrances from Ezriel Polatsek and others in 2011, installed Glenn Palmer as the new CEO, and made Polatsek president and COO. Page two of the complaint makes this eye-popping statement:

Due to Polatsek’s illegal behavior, defalcations, multiple violations of Company policy, and overall abysmal employment performance, Plaintiffs terminated his employment, effective October 10, 2013.

Dude!

The new owners are going after a slew of Polatseks, including former president Ezriel, his wife Sarah, and his father Harry, all of whom were or are employees of Preferred Fragrance, Inc. (Mentioned indirectly in the lawsuit are Ezriel’s brothers Abraham, another company employee, and Joel, who owns JP Filling, a company that does business with Preferred.) Four other defendants are former shareholders in the old Preferred Fragrance.

We learn from the court filing that Ezriel Polatsek was hired full time at a base salary of $236,000 (soon to be bumped to $300,000) along with automatic cost of living increases and bonus. So what did he allegedly do to warrant dismissal and a lawsuit charging fraud and breach of contract?

Uni-World claims that prior to completion of the sale, the Polatseks et al. materially changed the terms of arrangements Preferred had with some of its largest suppliers and customers, while failing to inform the new owners. The new terms would have reduced Preferred’s book value; the upshot is that the new owners feel they were deceived into overpaying and they want their money back. In addition, about 300 shipping containers from China were, according to Uni-World, inappropriately classified as non-hazardous material in order to save a couple of hundred bucks per container. The resulting overstatement of company earnings, multiplied by a standard factor in the purchase agreement, is claimed to have cost Uni-World a loss of $350,376. Uni-World also claims the previous owners provided “false and fraudulent” information regarding sales projections.

On a more personal note, Uni-World claims that Ezriel Polatsek on two occasions pocketed cash payments from customers ($11,000 in one instance, and about $14,000 in another). [Cash payments? What business pays another that sort of money in cash?—Ed.] The complaint says that Polatsek failed to show up to two of the company’s quarterly board meetings, and was a no-show at the all-important ASD trade show in Las Vegas last August (he previously attended every year). Other alleged misbehavior includes use of company funds for non-company-related travel; excessive charges for airfare, hotel and personal car service; mismanagement of customer relations resulting in monetary loss; and extending company credit without securing payment (an advance to a colleague’s brother that resulted in a $100,000 write-off).

According to the plaintiff’s timeline, they confronted Polatsek and the other defendants with these issues in April, 2013. Discussions led nowhere and on September 13, 2013 Ezriel Polatsek and the old company filed suit against the new owners in New York state court. They deny breaching the sales agreement, say they are not responsible for the losses claimed, and allege that Uni-World is suing in order to pin its own business failings on them. As a finishing touch, Polatsek wants the court to free him from his non-compete agreement with Preferred.

For its part, Uni-World wants $5.6 million from the defendants and a ruling that its for-cause firing of Ezriel Polatsek and the non-compete clause are valid and enforceable.

Will somebody please fire up the popcorn? This is going to be good.

Your Cheating Scent

Tempo, an online news site in the Philippines, features advice columnist Manay Gina. Here’s a letter she posted yesterday:

Dear Manay Gina,

One day, while I was putting our clothes away for laundry, I found a shirt my husband had worn to work. Surprisingly, it was scented—a really strong one. I know that my husband does not go to work with cologne on. When I inquired about his change of habit, he got very defensive and asked if I was accusing him of something.

Do you think I should be suspicious?

Tarcy

Manay Gina takes a wait-and-see attitude. Here at FirstNerve we’re more like “duh.” [Yeah, but is he seeing a woman or a man?—Ed.]

Advice Columnist Steers Widower to Certain Disaster

Okay, so it’s not exactly I Smell Dead People—more like “I smell my late wife’s perfume on my new girlfriend and it’s a problem.” Advice columnist Jann Blackstone tells the guy to avoid being truthful because “rarely do women like to be compared to one another” and because it might look like problematic devotion to his late wife.

Hmmm.

Blackstone advises the widower to shop for a new perfume for the GF, and perhaps even “take her with you and actually spend some time together in the process.” This sounds good at a theoretical level: use the power of scent to create positive new associations. But at a practical level it is a recipe for disaster.

Choosing a fragrance for another person is difficult enough; add the emotional undercurrents of this relationship and it’s fraught with peril. Secondly, Blackstone is directing the guy to the women’s fragrance counter: seldom a comfortable situation for a male. All we know is that the widower liked his wife’s perfume, not that he is knowledgeable about or even interested in women’s perfume in general, much less at ease browsing for it. So Blackstone is recommending that the guy give style advice, no matter how indirectly, to a woman he doesn’t know that well yet, and do it in the live-fire zone of a fragrance counter.

This strike me as well-intentioned but terrible advice.

Fragrance Felony: Why Steal a Discontinued Perfume?

From the HuffPo: “Juan Bernal Stole $117,000 Worth of Perfume in New Jersey, Including Victoria’s Secret Line: Cops.”

Why is this filed under Weird News? Because it conjures up an image of some guy tiptoeing out of a store with hundreds of bottles of perfume? Not exactly.

Cops say Bernal stole 1,890 4.2-ounce bottles of 5th Avenue by Elizabeth Arden Friday, valued at $109,620. He also reportedly took 234 3.4-ounce bottles of Victoria’s Secret PINK, valued at $7,488.

That’s close to 1,000 pounds worth of goods. Not something you can slip into your pants.

Juan Bernal, 52, allegedly employed a 17-year-old boy to help him pull off the haute heist. The two are accused of loading thousands of bottles swiped from Cosmetics Essence Innovations in Holmdel into an SUV . . .

So the goods were stolen from a manufacturer’s facility and the kid was the muscle. Wholesale perfume theft is big economic issue, although by New Jersey standards this heist was small potatoes. (Cops are valuing the Eliz. Arden at full list price of $58.)

I do think there is a “weird” element to this story. According to this report, the VS perfume was Live Pink, launched in 2010 and now discontinued. Here’s my question: Does this make it more or less valuable on the black market? In other words, is Juan Bernal a criminal mastermind or a doofus?

I’d love to hear what some fume heads think.

The Perfume Lover: Denyse Beaulieu in Greenwich Village

The U.S. edition of Denyse Beaulieu’s The Perfume Lover will be released tomorrow. (I blurbed it!) You can get it on Amazon, or better yet buy one in person this Friday and have Denyse sign it for you. The book signing is at the Aedes de Venustas store in Greenwich Village and runs from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. (I’ll be there!) You’ll also get to smell Séville à l’aube, the perfume at the center of the story.

Also recommended: this CBC interview in which Denyse covers everything from new EU fragrance regs to the history of perfume.

Dolce & Gabbana Go to a Sex Therapist

“If a fragrance is announcing desire, what it’s doing is altering you to pay attention to the potential, for inviting you to experience aspects of your desire.”

Does this make any sense, grammatically or otherwise?

Visions Did Appear

The Winsome Katie Puckrik™ videoblogs a promotional fragrance from Pizza Hut. And I watched it from start to finish. Yes, she’s that good.

When is she going to get her own TV show?

FirstNerve Review: The Art of Scent 1889 – 2012

The Scent Stripped Bare by Its Curator, Even.

The Art of Scent 1889 – 2012 occupies the fourth floor of the Museum of Arts & Design on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. The main exhibit is a large room with a white wall. Along the wall are twelve smooth indentations that from a distance look as if a giant pressed his thumb into putty. On closer inspection each has a narrow cleft at the bottom. The overall effect is vaguely gynecological. Lean into the shallow, curved opening and you notice a hole in the bottom. A sly reference to Duchamp’s urinal? A hiss and a low rumble of plumbing announce a scented air stream rushing to meet your face. It’s MAD’s version of a swirlie.

An explanatory text appears now and then beside the opening, backlit in white letters. The text is reproduced in a pamphlet that observes all the proper forms of an art show catalog: artist’s name, the work’s title, its date and provenance, and a brief description of its significance. Except that the twelve art works in question are perfumes. And therein lies the central conceit of The Art of Scent: its whiny, foot-stomping, insistence that perfume is Art.

A side room offers the same dozen perfumes in a more traditional medium—alcoholic solution. They are arranged in clear covered platters on a clear Plexiglas table surrounded by clear plastic stools. Labeled blotters are provided for dipping and sampling. (Unusually shaped, these are the capellini of blotters; they bring to mind the phrase pencil-dick bug f***er.)

Along the wall of the side room are five stations that dispense scent-sample cards from biomorphic protrusions on the wall. (They are suggestively labial in a Videodrome sort of way.) The samples consist of four accords from, and the complete formula of, Lancôme’s Trésor. Here a visitor actually gets to look under the hood and see how perfumer Sophia Grojsman built the fragrance. The accords (incorrectly equated with “mods” in the accompanying text) by themselves are stark and seemingly unrelated; their integration in the finished fragrance is remarkable, and vividly illustrates the complicated, combinatorial magic of perfumery.

The liquid versions don’t always match those wafting out of the wall, which were adapted to suit the dry delivery system. In particular, the wall’s Drakkar Noir was coming apart—a grassy note stood out and the impression was not at all like the (very familiar) commercial product.

The final piece of the exhibit is an iPad app that lets visitors pair an abstract descriptor with a realistic one to describe each perfume, and then projects a word cloud representation of the current tally onto a screen at the end of the room. Pointless but harmless fun.

All this spritz and tell has one objective: to sell the notion that perfume is Art. In a world where a crucifix in jar of urine and a sliced-up sheep in formaldehyde are considered masterpieces, this would seem to be a fairly low bar to clear. Yet, the exhibit huffs and puffs to make its point.

For example, the words “perfume” and “perfumer” appear nowhere in the catalog. This ostentatious omission is part of curator Chandler Burr’s puerile attempt to win the argument by recasting its terms. He talks about olfactory art, not perfume. He talks about scent creators and scent artists, not perfumers. He talks about patrons, not perfume brands. He slings a lot of hash about “aesthetic visions,” “abstraction,” “ornamentation,” “minimalism,” “hyper-realism,” “diaphanous quality of light,” and “21st century sensibilities,” but nothing about top notes or fragrance families. The idea seems to be that if he can talk about perfume in purely artistic terms, it must be Art. But calling it so doesn’t make it so.

Beyond sheer assertion, Burr’s only specific claim is that olfactory Art only became possible with the invention of synthetic fragrance chemicals in the late 19th century:

By freeing olfactory artists from an exclusively natural palette, they [synesthetics] turned scent into an artistic medium.

So if you didn’t have coumarin or vanillin on the shelf, you weren’t doing Art. Tough beans for Giovanni Maria Farina, who created Eau de Cologne in 1708, or Jean-Louis Fargeon, perfumer to Marie-Antoinette. And whatever ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian perfumers were doing, it wasn’t Art.

The odd thing about Burr’s claim is that it ignores the difference between a flower and a perfume oil. A pile of rose petals on the floor of a barn in Bulgaria does not a natural palette make. Petals must be distilled, extracted, de-waxed, filtered, and blended before the perfumer can reach for a bottle of rose oil. The same goes for the bales of patchouli, the crates of oakmoss, and so on. Once processed, these materials have an amplified, focused smell that, while it may be reminiscent of the source, is entirely novel, man-made, and not found in nature.

What’s missing from The Art of Scent, with its clean white walls and transparent furniture, are the messy, colorful worlds of commerce and fashion—the reason these fragrances exist in the first place. Consumers don’t buy Drakkar Noir to hang on the wall or admire on the mantelpiece. Yet in Burr World, Pierre Wargnye is an artist who woke up one morning in the mood to “violate” the “strict line between ‘fine’ and ‘functional’ fragrances.” The Muse told him to start with a shitload of synthetic dihydromyrcenol and the result was Art. In real life, the Guy Laroche people circulated a fragrance brief and Pierre Wargnye worked on it because that’s what his employer, a large, publicly traded New York corporation, asked him to do. And it became the “most significant and influential scent” of the 1980s because a lot of guys bought it. To wear. On their skin. To attract chicks.

You can stick your head in the wall all day long, but you won’t learn that at MAD. The Art of Scent 1889 – 2012 smells okay, but it’s a history deprivation chamber.

P.S. As a gesture to loyal FN fans, we brought the BurrOMeter out of storage, fired it up, and aimed the sensors at the show catalog.




Name Drops: 17

Aimé Guerlain
Ernest Beaux
Francis Fabron
Bernard Chant
Carol Phillips
Pierre Wargnye
Olivier Cresp
Jacques Cavallier
Annie Buzantian
Alberto Morillas
Jean-Claude Ellena
Carlos Benaim
Max Gavarry
Clément Gavarry
Daniela Andrier
Issey Miyake
Miuccia Prada

Bonus Points:

Perfumers: 14
French: 10
Designers: 2
Moguls: 1

Jean-Claude Ellena Deluxe Triple Bonus Points®: 3

Autre Merde Française Bonus Points: 4

Eiffel Tower
traditional French floral
nineteenth-century Paris
nineteenth-century French scent making

Le Capitaine Louis Renault Bonus Points: 4

shocking
shocked by
startling
dramatically

Total BurrOmeter reading for The Art of Scent: 55 milliburrs

Outlook: Clear skies, clear furniture. Smooth sailing: no friction, no traction.

The Tension Between Men and Women

In a brief interview with Krista Bennett DeMaio in the November issue of Women’s Health, sensory psychologist Margaret Spencer Avery Gilbert talks about women, sex, and manly notes in perfume.

Perfumers Squared at Elements Showcase

Just a quick report from day one of the Elements Showcase in NYC.

I attended the panel presentation hosted by Robertet, the French fragrance & flavor house now celebrating their 160 years of creating rose essences. VP Arnaud Adrian ran down the basics of harvesting and extracting fragrance from Rosa damascena and showed a beautifully produced video of the company's operation in Senir, Turkey.

Then moderator Jennifer Powderly, Robertet's marketing director, turned to two perfumers who each had created a full fragrance to demonstrate the use of the company's rose essential oil and rose petal essence. They were invited to discuss their creative methods in general, and the aesthetic logic behind their demo fragrances in particular.

First up was Olivia Jan, a French perfumer with Robertet. She described how she works to express a specific emotional state in her fragrances, often by imagining a story with a particular time and place. She sometimes engages the happy, playful quality of rose by blending it with apple or raspberry, or uses other fruits to achieve a more feminine impression. For the demo scent, however, she went for the "darker side" of rose by adding a smokey woody note (based on elemi). I enjoyed how she synaesthetically described matching the "roughness of the wood" against the "prettiness of the rose floralcy."

Next up was my old pal Mandy Aftel. Always a champion of natural materials--she says she is "besotted by them"--Mandy's modus operandi is to begin with a pair of key raw materials. In this case it was rose and tarragon absolute. She thinks of rose as her "workhorse," but also values it as a "great smoother." In other words, when she has added a bunch of "strange and eccentric" notes to her sketch (such as ginger, saffron, black pepper or pimento berry), the rose will smooth out the olfactive hububb.

Mandy has a charmingly animistic way of thinking about her work. She sees the raw materials as "friends," and when filling in the space between her two key materials, she "reaches for the friend she thinks is going to create the feeling" that she is after. All in all a fine panel, accompanied by blotters of the individual essences and finished fragrances.

Th-th-t-that's all for now, folks!

Is Lady Gaga 2.56 Times More Popular Than Justin Bieber?

That’s what industry buzz about Fame implies.

While Gaga and executives declined to comment on projected sales, industry sources estimated that the scent would achieve net sales globally of $100 million in its first year on counter, with at least 30 percent expected to come from U.S. sales.

The Bieb’s women’s fragrance did $39 million last year at retail. Thus the title question.

Since we’re doing the math, consider these tidbits:

While executives declined to comment on advertising and promotional spending, industry sources estimated the warchest at about $30 million globally in the scent’s first year.

and

While Coty declined comment on Gaga’s compensation, industry sources estimated that Gaga has been guaranteed a minimum of $15 million in royalties in a three- to five-year deal.

Now, using only your pencil, calculate Coty’s net sales if Fame sells $100 million, as predicted.

Next, calculate Coty’s net sales if Fame sells only a Bieberesque $39 million. Check your work. Is it possible to have negative net? You betcha.

Julie Naughton at WWD has the new Lady Gaga Fame promo photo (above). The comment section is not kind.

Our favorite quote-o-matic CEO, Bernd Beetz, issues this magnificent non sequitur:

“Absolutely everything about this launch is innovative, from the bottle, to the juice, to the lady herself . . . She’s zeitgeist in a bottle.”

Wha? Juice is to innovative as zeitgeist is to bottle? No, wait. Juice is to bottle as zeitgeist is to innovative? Can we get more time to work on this one?

Steve Mormoris, Coty Beauty’s SVP Global Marketing, waxes so lyrical about the Gaga scent that he becomes almost incoherent:

The juice’s structure is also unusual, Mormoris said. “It’s unique because it’s not pyramidal with a top, middle and bottom note,” he said. “It has a trampoline structure — notes are rising at different rates that are quite random. Some accords will come out if you rub it, other accords will come out later. It has random propulsion and doesn’t have a classic linear drydown. We call it push-pull, and it will smell different on different people. There is a different volatility for different notes, and they’re of differing strengths. They work together harmoniously, but then they undergo metamorphosis on the skin, so you’re constantly surprised.”

So . . . the notes of Fame emerge at random, yet they work together harmoniously. The structure of Fame is not pyramidal or linear . . . it’s up-down like a trampoline, but also push-pull.

It’s sort of like zeitgeist in a bottle.

Sergio Momo at MiN New York

Sergio Momo

Instead of firing up the Weber and enjoying some brats and brewsky at First Nerve Manor, I decided to take up Mindy Yang’s invitation to meet Italian niche perfumer Sergio Momo at MiN New York this afternoon. I’m glad I did.

The MiN New York atelier on Crosby Street in SoHo is a club-like shop cum lounge presided over by Mindy and her partner Chad. They select and showcase fragrances by niche perfumers, and their monthly events are quite the gathering spot for perfumistas and the bloggers who encourage them.

Today’s event featured Sergio Momo, from Turin, who introduced new additions to his Xerjoff brand. Brand is perhaps not the right word to describe his array of 31 fragrances, arranged into five collections. Momo himself thinks of each collection as an art project, and Xerjoff as a design portfolio. He supplies the creative concept and works with French essential oil houses, Italian craftsmen (his bottles include Murano blown glass, carved stones flacons, etc.) and perfumers from Spain, Italy and the Middle East, to bring the concepts to life. Here, for once, the title “creative director” is merited.

The aesthetics and finish level of the Xerjoff collections—Shooting Stars, Oud Stars, Casamorati, etc.—are refined and elegant in the best tradition of Italian design. And there’s some showmanship as well: each bottle of the Shooting Star series comes with a certified fragment of an actual meteorite.

Separated at birth?

The MiN New York event—complete with custom champagne-based cocktails inspired by one of the Sergio Momo fragrances—began on the dot when a crowd of perfumistas materialized in the club house. And what a crowd it was. I met Barbara Herman, a.k.a. Perfumaniac, who writes at Yesterday’s Perfume; she’s currently at work on a book with the awesome title of Scent and Subversion.

Making her way in from Brooklyn was Lucy Raubertas of Indieperfumes, who seems to have recovered from the trauma of having her blog content illegally appropriated. Her newly reconstituted site is beautifully designed and worth a visit.

Also on hand were fellow Garden Stater Gaia, the non-blonde of TheNonBlonde blog, who guided me through the Andy Tauer fragrances that were on display, and Ida Meister of Chayaruchama who also writes at Fragrantica.

Hats off to Mindy and Chad for creating a retail space and social venue that perfectly capture the niche perfume phenomenon.

Natick’s Most Wanted

This alleged perfume shoplifter is pretty brazen. She strolls in, texting on her phone, and drops up to nine bottles into her purse. Yeah, the security alarm went off, but she had a getaway car idling outside.

The Natick, Massachusetts police department has posted the security video in hopes of identifying her. You can watch it here.

Any sharp-eyed readers recognize the store or the brands she swiped? Better yet, anyone recognize the schlubette herself?

The Sephora Sensorium

So I hit the Sephora Sensorium interactive exhibit on W. 14th Street this weekend. Subtitled “Lucid Dreams from the Sensory World,” the show opened in early October, and will close on November 27.

It basically consists of a loop to the far end and back of a narrow retail popup space in the Chelsea Market. The initial Perfumology section has a timeline of perfumery painted along one wall; it’s rather perfunctory (Cleopatra, Mitsouko, Justin Bieber, yadda yadda) and literal (it’s a . . . line). Opposite the wall are an interesting hodge-podge of artifacts, including a 1950s coin-operated perfume vending machine, which I’ve blogged about but never seen in real life (it’s smaller than I’d imagined). There are beautiful glass cylinders filled with perfumery raw materials, and screens playing brief videos about topics such as the relation of top, middle and base notes to molecular volatility.

This section also has the show’s best interactive display: a round table on a base. The table surface is divided into quadrants, each illustrated with a gorgeous color photo: red pepper corns, star anise, etc. Each quadrant has a button-activated nozzle; you lean over, immersed in the image, and get a stream of air carrying the wonderful scent of the raw material. I’ve seen a lot of scent-delivery exhibits and this was one of the best executed. Too bad star anise is about to be dialed out of perfumery due to the corporate statism of IFRA and the EU regulatory state.

The next section—Senseless—is set of sound-dampened “isolation booths” where you don headphones and listen to voices narrating the depressing experience of anosmia. Although it does have a clever experiential twist at the end—involving a cherry lollypop—I’m puzzled that so much exhibit time is spent on the absence of smell.

At the top of the back stretch comes Life at First Scent, sculptures and assemblages that are spot-lit one by one, with accompanying projected video background and scent release. For example, a lifelike bronze sculpture of a squirming octopus is accompanied by the scent of salt air and sea mist. Interesting, not awesome.

On through black curtains to the Lab of Emotion, a darkened space with wall-mounted chemistry glassware percolating away, while videos play behind glass domes. Four displays presented different emotions, and each display had three or four scent sampling ports. Inserting your hand into the port dispensed a scent. At least I think that was the idea—the ports were too low to bend over and sniff conveniently, and there were several which didn’t seem to be dispensing. There was a lot of text on each display, which prompted the relevant emotion, described the scent, and identified the perfumer. For me, the visual preoccupation with the text detracted from the olfactory experience. This tends to be an issue with most interactive smell exhibits; it’s not easy to balance spontaneity and scent with verbal/textual messaging.

Lucid Dreams, the next darkened space, was four, small, illuminated sniffing globes. The air pressure changes caused by your sniffing trigger spacy, abstract videos back-projected on a scrim behind the globe. Here the exhibit design was excellent—no bending over, very little text—but the fragrances themselves were disappointing. They were tame and indistinct and lacked the trippiness of the visual images.

From Lucid Dreams, one emerged into the light and the Fragrance Bar. This was literally set up like a bar, complete with stools. On the counter were four color coded trays, each carrying six overturned, stemless wine glasses. An absorbent scent sticker the size of a quarter was stuck to the bottom (= upended top) of each glass. One sampled the fragrance—the drydown of an actual, commercial perfume—by upending the glass and sticking your nose in it. Clever, yet simple. This setup is lifted from the wine business, where you cover a glass of wine with a flat plate, and lift it to sample the accumulated aroma of the wine.

In the Fragrance Bar, each tray with its flight of six glasses represented a different theme: playful, polished, casual, and addictive. You could make sniffing notes in a little booklet, and if a scent struck your fancy the bar tender (in my visit a well-informed retail guy who works at Sephora) identifies the brand and offers to sell you a bottle.

The Fragrance Bar uses drydown notes for practical reasons—how would you constantly refresh top note samples?—and for consumer reality: you enjoy top notes briefly, but live with the drydown for the rest of the day, so it’s important that you like it.

Sniffing two dozen drydowns in a row was quite an experience, and the results were shocking. Where a top note sampling would have been a parade of different come-ons (sweet, fruity, spicy, aldehydic, etc.), the base notes were of a much narrower olfactory range. They were far less individually distinctive, often muddled. That the Jennifer Aniston perfume, with its literal-minded evocation of sunscreen, stood out tells you something about the state of modern perfumery. Enormous effort goes into designing the short-lived top notes that leap from the bottle and grab your nose and credit card. The heart gets some attention, if only as a pleasing transition. But drydown is almost an afterthought, murky and indistinct. Perfumes for the age of short attention span.

Hats off to Sephora and Firmenich for providing some entertainment, education and provocation, and for offering the largest blind sampling of commercial fragrances you’re likely to encounter. The $15 admission fee becomes a gift credit at Sephora, so it’s really a freebie for fragrance fans.