Smelling Neutrally, Smelling Completely: The Incredible Nose of Sissel Tolaas

“What I try to do is to prove that we are breathing in all this information but we have no tools to make use of it. We can render up to 10,000 different smells but we use only fifteen to twenty percent of this information. We have only two words to describe them -- good or bad -- and there must be something done about it.”

- Sissel Tolaas

My sincere apologies for the late summer lull. Thankfully, my nose has been reinvigorated by the smell of twelve sweaty men, as captured and reproduced by artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas, the subject of a fascinating interview in Mono.Kultur #23. (More on the twelve sweaty men later.) The thrust of Tolaas’s research is investigating ways in which smell can be used as a means of communication, or put another way, developing a language with which we can communicate about smell in ways that we are currently unable to. 

Over the course of the interview she explains that lofty-sounding goal by describing some of her projects and the issues she explores through them, including:

• Breaking down prejudices and socially-conditioned judgments about smell by taking schoolchildren on smell-collecting field trips through what she calls “hardcore” neighborhoods in Berlin

• A collaboration with photographer and former skinhead Nick Knight to capture the smell of men when their testosterone levels are most elevated (even going so far as to arrange underground fights in which, somehow, the men were unaware their smell was being collected)

• An account of her work within the medical field, wherein a psychiatric patient was reawakened to the suppressed memory of witnessing his mother’s murder by the simulated smell of an ashtray

• Her relationships to the worlds of commercial fragrance and fashion, such as a scent project for Adidas with the goal of communicating the brand’s identity through scent, thereby creating an ‘invisible logo,’ or the fact that her lab is financed by aromachemical giant International Flavors and Fragrances

• Her personal library of 6,730 scents that she used to train herself, over seven years, to smell from as neutral a perspective as possible

I know it’s rather lazy to throw some bullets down into a book report, but there’s really no other way to illustrate the bewildering scope of Tolaas’s work, and how far-reaching its potential results are. Truth be told, it’s all rather serious and boundary-pushing relative to the dated pageantry and shallow repetitiveness that too often characterizes the perfume industry, and makes part of me question whether following and writing about commercial perfume (even niche or ‘indie’ perfume) is in fact narrowing a potentially broader and more rewarding curiosity.

But then if Tolaas’s relationship with IFF says anything, it’s that (for better or worse) the fragrance giants are the ones with the resources to fuel engines of creativity and progress, like Tolaas herself. For their investment they receive a constant stream of new ideas about scent. And while it’s not a certainty, it seems pretty likely to me that when those ideas become materially accessible to a majority of people, it will be the fragrance giants that bring them to us. So, as someone who feels my nose is many classes lower than the kind of precision instrument that Tolaas wields, I’m comfortable sticking well within the known and waiting to see what trickles down.

At the very least, I can say that exploring perfume has made me more conscious of all kinds of smells. I'm more conscious of the fact that I smell a room before I’m able to take it in visually, and that I smell people I’m greeting before I hear them talk. When a fire broke out in my building earlier this year, it was the smell of the smoke that woke me rather than the blaring alarm. A dramatic example, yes, but what I’ve come to understand is that, as Tolaas argues, scent is not atmospheric but rather elemental to the structure (or architecture, or design -- pick your term) of any environment. And understanding that, I’m glad Tolaas is working to bring the rest of the world up to speed.The interview is highly worth a read for any scent enthusiast. 

As a bonus, those twelve sweaty men I mentioned are featured in the magazine in ‘invisible portraits’ reproduced from Sissel’s show The Fear of Smell / The Smell of Fear, commissioned in 2006 by MIT. Sissel designed an armpit-borne device that collected the sweat of twenty-one men who suffered from severe phobias, at the very moment they experienced those fears. She analyzed and reproduced the scents of their sweat and then, borrowing a process from IFF, microencapsulated the scents in a special paint that she applied to the walls of MIT’s gallery. The scents were released when observers rubbed the walls. To accompany the interview in Mono.Kultur, twelve of the scents have been microencapsulated onto the pages of the magazine. Guy No. 3 -- dude, call me!

Mono.Kultur #23 is available in the U.S. from Textfield.

Shoot Me...

Shoot me now.

Summer Crudité with a Side of Chandler Burr

A number of my friends have been talking up the local CSAs and farmshares they’re participating in this summer – something I have neither the discipline nor creativity to make the most of (what in the world would I do with two pounds of garlic scapes that will go bad in a week?). Luckily, while they’re congratulating each other for their armloads of sustainably-grown produce, I’ve got my own veggies to go on about. They're found in Tilda Swinton: Like This by Etat Libre d’Orange and I ♥ Les Carottes by Honoré des Prés.

An Anti-Celebrity Fragrance

Like This, an homage to actress Tilda Swinton from iconoclastic house Etat Libre d’Orange, is one I’ve been very keen to smell, but also suspicious of in the same way I’m suspicious of all celebrity scents. After its stateside launch at Henri Bendel in New York last week, I’ll concede that Mathilde Bijaoui's work was worth the wait. Tilda herself was there, stone-faced and fauxhawked, esconced on a high railed balcony overlooking the main floor, where she conducted a minimum of press interviews. Since I’m not ‘press’ by any stretch of the imagination, I didn’t get a chance to fawn over her, but I did manage to get a sorry iPhone picture of this rather puzzling display:

Given that they’re nowhere in the official notes listed for Like This, what’s with the carrots? The real star of the show here is the pumpkin accord – fleshy, sweet and quite vegetal. Immortelle makes a star turn, but in an uncharacteristically supporting role. Yes, it’s just as ‘everlasting’ here as it is in other immortelle fragrances, accounting for 95% of the scent’s 12-hour longevity. But it’s not working quite so hard to stand out from all the other ingredients, or simply to overwhelm them as immortelle is prone to doing. It harmonizes with them instead, providing a complex canvas for an accent of ginger and deepening the richness of the pumpkin. This spiced pumpkin-immortelle cocktail follows some mellow citrus top notes and works its way towards a soft, smooth base of rose, vetiver, heliotrope and clean musk.

Like This is a challenging fragrance, clearly meant to be an artistic reach rather than a crowd-pleaser. It differs in that respect from virtually all other celebrity fragrances, and also in the sense that it actually reflects the aesthetic character of its namesake: striking, strange and desirable.

A Short Scene in a Department Store

The best part of this whole affair, though, was that I got to meet one of my perfume heroes – Chandler Burr, author, journalist and scent critic for T magazine, whose “Scent Notes” are the genesis of my now full-blown obsession with perfume. I greeted him on his way out with a crack in my voice and some egregiously untrimmed nosehairs, and he was gracious enough to speak to me for about 45 mortifying seconds. It went something like this:

INT. HENRI BENDEL, 2ND FLOOR – DAY

ARTHUR hovers by the elevator as CHANDLER BURR approaches.

ARTHUR

Excuse me, are you Chandler Burr?

CHANDLER

(leaning down because he is very tall)

Yes.

ARTHUR

Hi. Sorry to be a creepy hanger-on; I just wanted to say hello and that your column in T  is what got me interested in perfume.

CHANDLER

Oh, great. … That’s what we try to do.

ARTHUR

Can I ask what you think of the fragrance?

CHANDLER

I love it. I know Tilda and can tell you that she was very involved in every part of the process, and the fragrance is such a surprise. It’s a spicy, [something I can’t remember], abstract expressionist gourmand.

ARTHUR

I’m impressed with how they used immortelle.

CHANDLER

Yes. I do not like immortelle, and I think it’s great here.

ARTHUR

Yeah, I really love this line. I own Fat Electrician, [mumbling sheepishly]…

The elevator dings: going down.

CHANDLER

I’ve got to run, sorry.

ARTHUR

Sure, nice to meet…

CHANDLER turns and gets on the elevator.

ARTHUR (cont’d)

…you.

What’s Yr Take On Giacobetti?

(Bonus points for anyone who gets the musical reference in that subhead!)  I bought I ♥ Les Carottes without having smelled it for two reasons: 1) I love root smells, and 2) it was authored by Olivia Giacobetti. I don’t regret it in the least. If Like This is – as Mr. Burr sensibly suggests – an exercise in abstract expressionism, then Giacobetti’s new scent for French indie organic line Honoré des Prés is an equally captivating stab at something like photorealism.

Using carrot seed oil, sweet orange and a beautifully rooty iris, Giacobetti has created an uncompromised olfactory expression of newly-pulled, dirt-covered carrots. The impression is immediate, with a strong anise-y aspect accompanying the raw sweetness. Earthy patchouli and Madagascan vanilla are the only fixatives, and make for an unfussy and comfortable drydown.

The literalism and simplicity of this perfume is very representative, I find, of Giacobetti’s style. Whether it’s the wet-cardboard marvel of her Dzing! for L’Artisan, or the grey pepper and driftwood of her Preparation Parfumée for Andrée Putman, her compositions are unfailingly straightforward and stray not an inch from their strict intentions.

I ♥ Les Carottes is one of the three Honoré des Prés scents that comprise their new “We Love New York” collection, and they’ve really squeezed the theme dry. The flacon comes lodged in an HdP branded coffee cup, nestled inside a crumpled brown bag. The promotional copy even includes an anecdote about Olivia Giacobetti cooking and freezing and re-cooking organic carrots grown in Harlem (eh?). I interpreted it as a cheeky admission that I could get the same results from splashing an orange-carrot Jamba Juice all over my torso.

Most cryptically, the blurb goes on to reference the “it-carrot culture”… Do I take that to mean I’m among those manning the prow of some carrot moment? Or perhaps the more appropriate question would be whether these two examples consitute a trend: is 2010 the year of the vegetable gourmand? I wouldn’t be disappointed.

Etat Libre d’Orange Tilda Swinton: Like This is $100 for 50 ml, at Henri Bendel or LuckyScent. Honoré des Prés I ♥ Les Carottes is about $80 for 50 ml, at Colette.

A heartfelt thank-you to Lendon Flanagan for the I ♥ Les Carottes photo.

Local Favorite: MiN New York

For both novices and nerds like me, shopping for perfume can be an awfully frustrating retail experience. Perfume salespeople range from the desperately solicitous to the rudely dismissive, and most stores (in New York, anyway) that carry anything worth buying have simply too large a variety to sample without suffering a serious case of nose fatigue. Worst of all is the frequently unsound guidance dispensed by some salespeople: in the case of one department store associate who I asked about a certain brand, this guidance was limited to indicating which scents were “for gentlemen” and which “for ladies.”

Fortunately for fellow New York perfume junkies, there’s a remedy in MiN, an apothecary on Crosby street that stocks  a diverse but tightly edited collection of fragrances, many of which are exclusive to them, and an equally discerning selection of men’s grooming products. Mindy and Chad, the owners, have a genuine interest in perfume and share their knowledge helpfully, as opposed to imperiously. Even the space itself (a bit clubby and masculine; stately ceiling height; lots of wood) is a welcome change from harshly lit department stores and cramped upscale pharmacies.

Linari, one of the lines they carry exclusively, is a relatively new line of four luxury fragrances. Eleganza Luminosa (an exceptionally pretty and balanced feminine floral) and Vista Sul Mare (a citrus-ozonic scent with a spicy floral heart and soft amber-cedar base – talk about development!) were created by Egon Oelkers, whose strong suits appear to be sophistication and reserved luxury. The more interesting Linari fragrances to my nose are the two authored by Mark Buxton, who can also do luxury but not without a deliberate twist. Hence the heady herbal cocktail of absinthe, clove and sage that lifts the blandly woody heart of Notte Bianca, or the startling cherry-raspberry accord that opens the gourmand Angelo di Fiume and manages not to smell like dessert.

All of the Linari fragrances are exceptionally complex, smell of extremely high quality ingredients and definitely have some tenaciousness on the skin, but they do seem very occasional and, for me anyway, too dressy to wear with any frequency. For something a little more rough around the edges, I turned to Frapin, the French cognac producer, which makes a line of perfumes also carried exclusively at MiN.

Admittedly the neatly trapezoidal bottles with their birch wood caps is what lured me in, but two of the scents kept me interested. Passion Boisée embodies a very old-world elegance and masculinity, with sweet spices (nutmeg, clove) to warm the citrus top notes, rum and glove leather to butch it up a bit, and oakmoss, patchouli and cedar for a super-dry chypre base. If I ever had what one could remotely call a ‘power lunch’ I would be all over this.

Finally, Terre de Sarment combines those same sweet spices (this time nutmeg and cinnamon) with grapefruit, cumin, both neroli and sweet orange blossom, a medley of resins, tobacco and vanilla. I don’t particularly like the first fifteen minutes of this scent, which is all spiced fruit, but it eventually assumes a mesmerizing oscillation between the cool, smokey incense and myrrh and the warm, ambery sweetness of the vanilla and benzoin. I wish the tobacco note were a bit earthier to give the dry down more dimension, but it’s still constantly interesting.

MiN New York is on Crosby street between Houston and Prince, in Soho. Among the other not-easy-to-find brands they carry are L’Artisan Parfumeur, Parfum d’Empire, Parfums d’Orsay, Penhaligon’s, Geo F. Trumper, CB I Hate Perfume, and Dr. Vranjes.

The Smell of Deep-Fried Marc Jacobs

As can be expected given today's prurient pop cultural tastes, most of the online chatter about Marc Jacobs's upcoming men's fragrance, Bang, is about his near-full monty ad.  Personally, I'm amazed that someone found an even more tasteless way than Tom Ford to juxtapose a flacon and a crotch.  I'm also impressed at how, with this ad, Marc Jacobs is straddling (heh) the line between 'designer' and 'celebrity' fragrance. But I think the honors for most entertaining response to the ad goes to Michael K at DListed: "Based on this ad, Marc's nectar probably smells like Jiffy Pop, butt sweat, Molly McButter sprinkles, and cups of grease from the jar my abuelita keeps under her sink. Basically, this is what I wish my apartment will smell like on a Friday night, but it ends up reeking like lonely tears and burnt Hot Pockets."

Alas, if Michael K had read just a bit further he might have discovered that Bang will not, in fact, have a butt sweat accord. Rather, it features a trio of peppercorns (black, pink and white -- evidently MJ likes pepper), er, "primal masculine woods", elemi, benzoin, vetiver, white moss and patchouli.  Peppery top notes and a vetiver-moss-patchouli dry down sound pretty on-trend for an explicitly masculine scent to me, so I'm wondering if the elemi and benzoin will have that great sweet-medicinal character to give it something different or, conversely, if they will manifest as a disappointing approximation of cheap vanilla extract.  To be priced at $55 / $75 for a 50 ml or 100 ml eau de toilette, Bang was created by Ann Gottlieb, author of (among other commercial powerhouses) CK be and Sarah Jessica Parker's Covet.  So yeah, I'm guessing cheap vanilla extract.

Bathroom Cleaner or Something Better? Oranges and Lemons Say the Bells of St. Clement’s, by Heeley

I’m all for applying the artistry of perfume to ambient fragrances (candles, room sprays and the like), but when it comes to cleaning, I like things as unadorned as possible. I use unscented Dove soap, Tide Free & Clear detergent and Comet. Even pleasantly scented cleaning products are usually way too strong: I bought a bottle of Mrs. Meyer’s Geranium all-purpose cleaner and had to stop using it because when I did, I couldn’t smell anything else for days.

I was thus unsure of how to react to the opening notes of James Heeley's new Oranges and Lemons Say the Bells of St. Clement’s, which are pure luxury bathroom cleaner – the ones that smell so nice and gentle that you wonder if they’re actually cleaning anything. There is indeed an initial blast of citrus (I get more bergamot, mandarin and petit grain than the namesake oranges and lemons), which occupies a sober middle ground between the Orange Fanta that blasts out of too many citrus scents and the aristocratic shock of something like Penhaligon’s Anthology Extract of Limes. Elegantly straightforward, the citrus in St. Clement’s owes more to the bitter peel than the sweet flesh, which is a-ok by me. A mild sweetness, though, appears courtesy of a swoon-worthy orange flower and a soapy ylang that may be better suited to plush white towels than skin, and ultimately rob the citrus of the luxurious austerity I’ve come to admire in many of Heeley’s other scents. Luckily the opening phase lasts ten minutes at most.

St. Clement’s doesn’t really click until three supporting notes yawn their way out of the woodwork: a smoky earl grey tea, a refined wet-earth vetiver, and a mellow, faintly salty musk. The bitter citrus loses some volume and in fact works much better as a complement to the tea than as a principal character. And finally, out of the musky-smoky heart, a tiny drop of lemon emerges. It’s this later phase that captivates me: both warm and cool, soft and sharp, dim and bright. The musky aspect strikes me as just a bit dirty, which is the main reason I’m so enamored of it. To noses that aren’t as sensitive to musks as mine, I imagine it would stay trapped in the unremarkable ‘fresh’ and ‘clean’ territory where it begins. (Too bad for those people.)

After its spa-candle opening, St. Clement’s is extremely reserved in terms of sillage, and its longevity isn’t anything to write home about. I’ve only applied this by hand from a sample vial, so perhaps an atomizer would make it more than a skin scent, but either way I’m very close to convinced that a bottle of this belongs in my collection.

Oranges and Lemons Say the Bells of St. Clement’s is an eau de parfum, available in a 100ml bottle at luckyscent.

Happy 4/20: Stoned by Solange Azagury-Partridge

One of the more romantic notions of perfume that I'm susceptible to is the 'signature scent' -- when a person wears only one scent and routinely enough to be recognized by it, the person and the scent becoming inseparable in the minds of those who know them. It would be nice, wouldn't it, to have one less choice we feel we must make?

As appealing as the idea is, I've sacrificed the comfortable regularity of a signature scent for the equally compelling joy of collecting, and chief among the pleasures of accumulating a scent collection is the matching of scents to the right occasions and moods. It brings about the opportunity to go beyond just 'good' or 'bad' in appreciating perfume; to consider whether a scent is celebratory or solemn, discreet or gregarious, mellow or tweaky, or any number of other specific qualities. It gives perfume a chance to contribute to one's experience of an occasion, rather than being merely incidental.

Take what I'm wearing in celebration of today's date (which has, yes, some significance for me): Stoned, the 2006 debut perfume from London jeweller Solange Azagury-Partridge, authored by Lynn Harris of the Miller Harris line. Beyond the chuckle-worthy coincidence of its name, Stoned has about it a rich, hazy yet contemplative feeling that, while not quite psychotropic, would provide a just-about-perfect complement to such - ahem - activities.

As floral-orientals go, it's quite gingerly with its floral facets (jasmine and rose), which are stacked up front and gorgeously dirty. In the first instant the florals are joined by a light, fresh bergamot that seems to be replaced in the very next instant by some mild but wholly present patchouli. It's the kind of earthy, musty patchouli I love and neatly avoids the hippie-dippie zone.

About fifteen to twenty minutes in, all of that cedes the foreground to a powdery, blanket-like layer of resins and tree moss. The super-rich labdanum, benzoin and heliotrope sometimes verge on ice cream-sweetness, but the tree moss along with a high-quality bourbon vanilla and sheer musk in the base keep it tasteful. It's also relatively understated in its sillage, but sticks around for at least five or six hours on me.

The sole comment I received on a prior wearing of Stoned was that it smells "like the '80s." I didn't disagree, at least in the sense that the soft, vintage-y texture could easily pull off the impression of an unearthed, decades-old thrift store treasure. Opulence is another sense in which Stoned harkens back to the days of bigger, badder orientals, but this opulence is somewhat contrived, taking the form of microscopic diamond dust blended into the perfume and an exquisitely cheesy crimson bottle (complete with vaguely-Asian goddess stopper). The scent itself is not ostentatious and shouty the way Poison or Antaeus or other '80s powerhouses can be. It's rich and full-bodied, but lets the packaging (and price) do the shouting.

All things considered, if I had three extra bills lying around, I'd happily add that cheesy bottle to my collection -- even if it's only perfect for one very special day of the year.

Stoned eau de parfum is available in the 100ml bottle at Lucky Scent.

Translating Margiela

I.

Shall we get right to it? (untitled), the first fragrance from Maison Martin Margiela, was composed by the gifted Daniela Andrier, a watercolorist of a perfumer and the author of Prada’s madly successful Infusions series, and it proceeds something like this: a splash of fresh wet green to start; soft, cuddly resins wrapping a statuesque bigarade; a polite suggestion of jasmine and warm cedar; pretty-but-anemic musk and a drop of sweat. It generates more than decent sillage, but after the opening blast of galbanum fades (it doesn’t take long), all I smell from a distance is pillow-soft amber and bitter orange. If I really hound my wrist I get the faintly animalic musky base and traces of incense.

These are lovely notes, every one, and elegantly interwoven, yet I’m left wishing for twice the effect packed in half the volume, and more importantly, something to skew it a degree or two off-trend. (untitled) is a very nice fragrance, but in the way that a Margiela t-shirt is just a ‘very nice’ t-shirt.

Luckily for the Diesel Group (Maison Martin Margiela’s new corporate parent), very nice is plenty good enough for a lot of people – especially, I would wager, the kind of people who prize expensive simplicity and prefer to smell ‘like nothing.’ I can’t help wondering, though, what might have been if the same devil-may-care daringness had been applied to this project as has been devoted to the house’s most thought-provoking designs. What if the bracing, bitter green notes were prolonged, kept aloft by brighter, headier incense instead of giving way to the woody-floral heart? Or what if the musks were even dirtier, saltier, suggestive of a wet animal coat made strangely desirable (think of the wet fur facet of L’Artisan’s Méchant Loup)?

I’m not suggesting either of these ideas would be better than what ended up in the bottle. The trouble with (untitled) is that I can’t seem to find its identity. It somehow feels overdone and incomplete at the same time. And while I know it’s splitting hairs to say so, even the way it was introduced lacked the intelligence and straightforwardness on which la Maison stakes its reputation.

Last week’s event at the New York Margiela store, for example, featured no experiential process by which to try the scent, unless you want to count the precious scented cloth buttons that were pinned to lapels here and there. Unlike the comparably lavish Paris launch, there was no tower of bottles, no flashy reveal, and no white confetti either. There was merely a pair of tester bottles on a sober white pedestal – arguably more in sync with the house’s aesthetic and yet not very exciting – and a surplus of hors d’oeuvre-bearing waiters. I was kind of hoping I would have to follow the scent across an unlit room to its source on the gaunt neck of a nude model, or something to that effect. I gave up a ticket to Die Zauberflote so I could attend, for pete’s sake! Admittedly, that imaginary scenario is more for-its-own-sake wackitude than something actually meaningful, but surely the passing of lukewarm beet canapes isn’t the only alternative.

Conversely, the house appeared intent on taking its fragrance seriously even if no one else cared to. The testers bottles were accompanied by a handful of small vials bearing samples of (untitled)’s featured raw ingredients (galbanum, galbanum resinoid, bigarade orange, lentiscus resinoid (mastic), and incense) – a thoughtful way of being informative that, by my count, about three partygoers took advantage of. Considering the fashion-oriented crowd and the mill-about, free champagne mood of the gathering, that forlorn display seemed to cry out for all the perfume geeks who weren’t there. It worked as a visual reminder of the house’s preoccupation with construction and process, but then if they really wanted (untitled) to live up to its name and “to hold different meanings for different people” (which itself is not a particularly unique sentiment about perfume), they might have considered not publicizing the list of notes at all, as Hermès did with their new Voyage.

I like (untitled) more than I’m letting on. But at the end of the day, I would’ve believed any number of other designer names slapped on the smart, paint-dipped lab bottle, and I find it difficult to believe (as the house insists) that Martin Margiela himself had anything to do with the project.

II.

The most curious part of the whole enterprise, though, is the deliberately obfuscated marketing copy being used to promote it. In the interest of mining the true intentions behind (untitled), I took the liberty of translating a few breezy excerpts into more everyday statements:

“Everyone can feel called into question by a colour, a shape or a garment… We wanted to give perfume the same chance. Stripped of any reference to an influence of precise climate, (untitled) can be interpreted and worn for all occasions by every one of us.”

Translation: “Everyone can feel befuddled from time to time by our most overwrought pieces. We wanted to disorient our audience with perfume as well, except in the sense that it has little to do with our founder’s vision, which really no longer directs the house anyway, you see. (untitled) takes Margiela into an entirely new market, bearing an instantly familiar, purely pleasurable character.”

• • •

“For its first olfactive creation, Maison Martin Margiela has chosen to strike out on a new path, reformulating the forgotten green fragrances that symbolised the femininity of the 1970s… The principal element of this woody green floral is Galbanum, a fine and rare raw material. Its incisive notes are boosted with the bitterness of box green, the vibrancy of lentiscus and incense, and the smoothness of bitter orange. Like a huge armful of plants harvested just after the rain, its raw state recalling pared-down garments and hems cut open, emblematic signatures of Maison Martin Margiela.”

Translation: “For our first scent we chose to try one of those green fragrances we learned about. It’s said they are reminiscent of a perfumery style from the ‘70s, and we totally heart the idea of ‘reinterpreting’ and ‘reinventing’ things from the past… The best way of blasting someone with green freshness is evidently a double-hit of galbanum, which is suitably uncommon and smells enough like wet plants that people can describe it as something other than just ‘clean.’ Then we loaded up on that awesome bigarade and some other, more subdued notes that make it smell discreetly expensive.”

• • •

“Faithful to its philosophy of metamorphosis, of finding a ›second life‹, Maison Martin Margiela turns this exhumed classical foundation upside down, and contrasts it with resonances of sweet jasmine and musky cedar. Its striking pedigree is then edged with a dense, almost filmy warmth.” (weird emphasis theirs)

Translation: “We had this retro style that we needed to bring into the ‘now’, so we included some airy jasmine and cedar notes for that luxury soap feeling, and finally some slightly dirty white musk that makes people think of their own skin. We figured that would make it attractive to people who are too cool or too confident or simply embarassed to wear perfume."

• • •

“I know that perfume must not follow a fashion or a trend, but an instinct. This first perfume expresses a femininity which does not fit into formal categories… I am grateful to Maison Martin Margiela for whispering the formula for this perfume into my ear.”  -- Daniela Andrier, perfumer

Translation: “I know that it’s important to this brand to believe in themselves as perfectly unique, so I designed their first perfume to evoke the kind of woman who works hard at her ‘effortless’ look, and is willing to go a few weeks without washing her hair for that bit of grit. I’m grateful that the imprimatur of a brand like Margiela made this gig a walk in the park. I mean, really, who’s going to object to galbanum two ways with an orange julius on top?”

• • •

“By creating fragrances woven in the most beautiful raw materials and melted with poetic impetus that is found in the inspired wearer, perfume can be saved from the terrible trivialization that threatens it. This is how I wrote the formula for this first perfume for Maison Martin Margiela, with that special grace that comes with the perception of the obvious, that clarity that gives us wings in the wonderful encounters of our lives.” -- Daniela Andrier

Translation: “I feel so fortunate to have been selected for this project. Thank the lord Diesel put up enough cash to give it some teeth! And all you catty perfume freaks who think I’ve cloned an easy hybrid of all my recent work can screw off and die. You know it's good! And it was actually a very welcome break from simply formulating the next flavor of Prada-ade.  But, please, don’t tell Miuccia. A girl has to eat, right?”

• • •

(untitled) is available in 30ml, 50ml and 75ml sizes at Maison Martin Margiela boutiques and online at Colette.

The Lusty Smell of Spring

Pedestrians strolling along many an avenue or boulevard on America's east coast lately may have noticed a pungent, slightly putrid and sickly sweet odor lacing the hot spring air. Perceptive types know that the odor comes from those ubiquitous trees that are suddenly awash in pretty white flowers -- a species my roommate fondly refers to as "the pussy trees."  I (as you may have guessed by now) wouldn't know about that, but have also heard people claiming the blossoms smell like "spooge," or whatever juvenile slang you want to put there.

For those of you who never took the time to investigate what the hell these trees are, allow me: Pyrus calleryana, or Callery Pear, is native to China and is named for the French missionary who introduced the tree to the western hemisphere. The most populous variety in the U.S. is a cultivar called the Bradford Pear, and while the scent of its flowers is near unavoidable from March to May, it is known to vary from year to year.

I tell you, this must be a bad year.


Photo by Jason Coleman, via flickr.

For D.C. Noses: "Scents & Medical Sensibility" at Smith Farm Center

It's always nice to see efforts to draw the world of scent closer to other creative disciplines. A recent talk by Christophe Laudamiel and the neurobiologist Stuart Firestein at the Rubin Museum of Art made a case for appreciating scents via the same critical faculties we use to think about music, sculpture, poetry or any other art. Parsons pushed the same envelope by asking attendees of its Headspace symposium to "acknowledge scent as a new territory for design," and invited architects and designers to become "accidental perfumers" by collaborating with established noses from IFF and Coty.

A new group exhibit from now to May 1 at Smith Farm Center for Healing and the Arts outside Washington, D.C. seems free of that self-important Manhattan luster, but explores similar territory from a bodily perspective: "how the physical self experiences and knows the world through the sense of smell…[and] the connection between physical health and visual, gustatory, and olfactory aesthetics." Curated by Kóan Jeff Baysa, a physician as well as curator and critic, this seems like an excellent place to nerd out for an afternoon. More info here.