Amuse-nez in Chelsea: ICONOSMS at Dillon Gallery

Last Thursday evening, walking west on 25th Street, the idea of attending a gallery opening suddenly felt like feeble excuse to be outdoors. I was being pummeled by an Arctic blast that raced across the river from New Jersey. The cold made my face hurt. Head down, I passed the Fisker showroom displaying a pumpkin orange Karma. I didn’t even stop. I marched past a gallery full of hipsters clustered around wall-mounted chunks of metal. Ahead of me, two guys wearing sneakers and tattoos were carefully arranging large black sacks in front of another well-lit gallery window. An assemblage? A performance piece? No, just setting out the garbage.

Then, near 11th Avenue, the icy wind whipped a warm floral perfume into my face and a moment later I noticed the sign for the Dillon Gallery. I had arrived. And I had already begun to experience the “osmo” portion of Volatile Marilyn #5, one of the ten new Iconosms created by Les Christophs.

These hybrid olfacto-visual artworks are the production of Christophe Laudamiel and Christoph Hornetz, the always interesting pair whose goal is “unleashed Perfumery,” an art form free of artistic, emotional and academic constraints. Each work consists of a scent (the Osmo), a visual element (the Icos), and a brief statement of the inspiration or intended experience.

For Volatile Marilyn #5, the scent is “a 21st century wink to Chanel N°5 (1921)” that “captures [Monroe’s] sheer whiteness, her innocence and her indefinable personality” as well as her ephemeral yet larger-than-life presence. It is diffused from a small unit located near Dreaming Marilyn DE#5, a print by photographer Laurent E. Badessi. Located nearest the gallery entrance, this was the scent that drifted out the doors and into the passing gale.

As with all the other works in the exhibit, Les Christophs are casually open about the formulation of Volatile Marilyn #5: “The 3 common ingredients found in both scents [i.e., Chanel N°5 and this piece] are rose extract, jasmine extract and methyl-nonyl aetaldehyde.” I’m not sure what the crowd (and it was a crowd—the large gallery space was soon packed) made of this information, but I found it engaging and illuminating, in the same way a wine menu might mention oaky notes in its Chardonnay. It drew me into the experience and offered contact points between my knowledge and the artists’ intent.

This transparency with respect to formulation is a signature of perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. He doesn’t mind you knowing how he achieves his effects. In Lilac Mon Amour, for example, he explains why natural lilac scent is unextractable from the floral source and how it must be recreated with other molecules from nature and the laboratory. He cheerfully refers to his artistic use of this rendering as a “trompe-nez” effect. The scent, diffused like most of the others inside its own small tent, is paired with a gorgeous print of a lilac blossom by photographer Brian Jones. The accompanying text captures the whimsical attitude of Les Christophs toward their art and audience:

“One can be transported as far as one wishes to go . . . or one can choose to remain under control, coercively preventing one’s own brain from day-dreaming . . . Just relax . . .”

It’s hard not to smile while reading this and inhaling the ultra life-like scent.

Not all of the visual elements are prints. In Gone with the Wind, colored threads unraveling from an embroidered cushion trail like scented kite tails in the breeze of a fan. In Fuller Helmets, the visitor raises his head into geodesic frames made of scented plastic. And in Muguet Patch 9, a collection of white stones sit on a swatch of AstroTurf; press them and they light up briefly as you inhale another trompe-nez effect—lily of the valley.

These are early days for olfactory art. There is no definition of it, only examples.The works on display in ICONOSMS are a delight. They are refreshingly free of dogma and politics; they do not attempt to shock. They lead the visitor by the nose and invite him to sample a specific experience. They entertain. And they are wonderfully self-curating.

Les Christophs “ICONOSMS” is on display at the Dillon Gallery, 555 West 25th Street in New York, from January 24 through February 6, 2013.

The Swedish Definition of Erotic Catastrophe

From The Local:

The Victoria Milan dating site, which targets the market for Swedes wanting to have an affair, asked more than 2,000 of its more than 200,000 Swedish members what they find most irritating about their regular partner.

Being bad-tempered, whinny and nagging are the top turn-offs for Swedish philanderers.

Other complaints included the woman being too close to her parents, being stingy, not cleaning enough, poor personal hygiene and snoring. 

“I had no idea women had such poor hygiene!” Victoria Milan spokeswoman Dominika Peczynski told The Local. 

“In my opinion, farting in front of a person that’s supposed to view you in any kind of romantic or erotic way is a catastrophe.”

Maybe that explains these Swedish traffic signs . . .

French Stink Offends the English

The Paris police department issued a statement saying the gas posed no health risks but warned that it smelled like a mixture of “sweat, garlic and rotten eggs”.

Sounds pretty much like l’odeur habituelle de la France. Okay, maybe not the rotten egg part. We’re talking a mercaptan release near Rouen which blew south then up across the Channel into Kent.

The culprit? Lubrizol. Owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Blame Warren Buffett!

UPDATE January 22, 2013

Quelle horreur! It’s reached Dover.

"The smell is just like the worst flatulent person ever standing with their back turned to you," Dover resident James Boyes told the Daily Mail. "It is truly, truly awful."

It’s drifted over Hampshire, Dorset, Oxfordshire, Northampton and the East Midlands.

It’s even hit London. It’s bigger than big.

The National Grid, which would normally deal with up to 10,000 calls a day to its gas emergency phone line, had received more than 100,000 calls by 14:00 GMT. A spokesman said it was an "unprecedented" volume.

Perfume Brands Prefer Spokesbeards

My first thought on reading that YSL has selected Garrett Hedlund as its new spokesface:

Who the hell is Garrett Hedlund?

My second thought:

What’s with the facial hair on male smellebrities?

Third thought:

Could all those academic psychologists be onto something?

4th:

Maybe I should stop shaving.

Final:

Naaah.

Pill Goggles: The Consequences of Oral Contraceptive Use During Mate Choice

There is a well-established bias, in humans and other mammals, to select mates who are genetically dissimilar at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This bias is thought to be the result of preferences for body odor expressed during mate selection. It is also known that oral contraceptive (OC) use by women reduces or reverses this bias, with the result that couples who meet when the woman is on the pill will be more MHC-similar. MHC-similarity has a downside: women in these relationships report reduced sexual satisfaction with their partner and increased interest in other men.

This raises an interesting question: what are the consequences for a relationship that started during OC use when, later in the relationship, the woman quits the pill?

One possibility is that with his MHC-similarity now exposed to her nose, she becomes less satisfied with her partner and the relationship suffers. On the other hand, OC users tend to prefer men with high parental investment traits such as wealth and intelligence, rather than guys with studly masculine traits like a strong chin and dominant behavior (also associated with higher unfaithfulness to partner). So it could be argued that a woman who chooses her partner while on the pill is more likely to remain satisfied with the relationship.

Untangling these possibilities is clearly not something that can be done experimentally. The best approach is to survey large numbers of women regarding various aspects of their relationships. S. Craig Roberts and his research team did this, selecting for study women who had at least one child in the relationship. (This roughly standardized for relationship commitment and guaranteed that women who had been on the pill at the time of mate choice experienced a change in hormone profile when they quit it to become pregnant.)

The researchers surveyed 2,519 women, of whom about 40% were OC users when their relationship was formed; the other 60% were non-users. Among women in currently ongoing relationships (about 70% of the total), the results were striking:

Women who used OC during partner choice (compared with non-users) scored lower on sexual arousal with their partner, on satisfaction with his sexual adventurousness, and on sexual proceptivity and attraction towards him. They also rated their partner’s body lower in attractiveness compared with non-users. By contrast, these women appeared more satisfied with general (nonsexual) aspects of their partner: they were significantly more satisfied with his financial provision compared with women who were not using OC during partner choice.

Even after statistically controlling for several factors unrelated to OC use and mate choice, the main effects remained: OC use at time of partner choice was associated with lower sexual satisfaction and with finding their partner less attractive. Similar results were found for retrospective ratings of ex-partners. When it comes to ending a relationship, women who used OC during partner choice were less likely to split up than were women not using OC. However, when a split did happen, it was more likely to be made by the woman if she was an OC user at the beginning, than if she were not. Interestingly, women who were OC users during partner choice “were more satisfied with non-sexual aspects of their relationship, including the partner’s financial provision.”

Where does all this leave us with respect to our initial questions?

As the authors put it, “a woman’s use of OC at the time when she meets her partner has measurable downstream consequences for partnership outcome.” The results are consistent with the hypothesis that OC use interferes with smell-based adaptive preferences for MHC-dissimilar men: OC users run a greater risk of sexually unsatisfying relationships in the long run. Yet to the extent that OC users tend to select men on the basis of being good providers rather than studly, pill use might increase the odds of successful long-term relationships. One way or another, pill goggles affect how a relationship plays out in the long run

The study discussed here is “Relationship satisfaction and outcome in women who meet their partner while using oral contraception,” by S. Craig Roberts, Kateřina Klapilová, Anthony C. Little, Robert P. Burriss, Benedict C. Jones, Lisa M. DeBruine, Marion Petrie, and Jan Havlícek, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 279:1430-1436, 2012.