Two Things that Make Me Happy (and One That Doesn't)

1) The packaging of Annick Goutal's upcoming Le Mimosa - Yes, the latest Goutal limited edition soliflore comes in the same fluted bottle as any old Goutal, but is anyone else kind of swooning for that dotted ribbon like I am? If I were a woman -- well, let's not go that far. But I encourage all my spring-loving female friends, come March, to buy a bottle of this, have a healthy spritz and repurpose the ribbon around the wrist or wherever it can be worn most saucily. (The fragrance, by the way, sounds nice as well: the eponymous ingredient backed up by iris, peach and sandalwood; green / fruity / powdery / milky seems to be the intended effect.)

2) The availability of Chanel's entire Les Exclusifs collection in a 75 ml size for $110 - I've always been impressed with how reasonably priced Les Exclusifs are ($210 for 200 ml) relative to other limited-release prestige lines like the Hermessence collection ($235 for 125 ml) or Tom Ford's Private Blend ($185 for 50 ml or *$480* for 250 ml in what looks like a brown glass whiskey decanter). But $210 is still a hefty amount to part with, and prior to now, Chanel's 200 ml-or-nothing! sizing has been pretty much the only deterrent to Sycomore and Cuir de Russie hopping right off the Saks counter into my man-tote. In other words, thank goodness Chanel finally caught on.

3) The new "Glee" fragrances to be made available soon by Boots in the UK - I am an unabashed anglophile, I love Boots, and I"m even addicted to "Glee" (addicted in the way one is addicted to crystal meth, I'll warn you), but I couldn't fight a wave of genuine depression at the thought of plucky British 12-year-olds sullying their (and everyone else's) noses with a £10 novelty spray called Divas Free your Glee. Yes, I know perfume needn't be haughty or expensive to be enjoyed, but nevertheless suspect that with these, there's definitely a reason they're only £10...

The Smell of Cuernavaca, the City of Eternal Spring

Tropical flora + wood + warm stone + saddle leather + sweet spice = the most fragrant wedding I've ever had the pleasure of attending. Felicitaciones por su boda, Elizabeth and Josh!

The Nightmare of Anosmia

Pavia Rosati lost her sense of smell when she suffered a head trauma four years ago. Profiled briefly for a New York Times series about New Yorkers who have lost a sense, Rosati claims to be relieved that she no longer smells garbage lining the street, but also talks about getting a dulled impression of anything she eats (she can still taste food, but without her nose, misses out on the fuller flavor created by spices, herbs or other aromatics). She also misses her Jardin sur le Nil.

I think New York would be an awfully depressing place to be anosmic, and not just because of the food. As ‘bad’ as many city smells are considered, I think the olfactory landscape at street level is a great democratizer – a visceral reminder of how little space so many of us share, and that billionaires smell the same dog shit as panhandlers.

Winter Wardrobe, Part 3: The Gift Certificate

(In which I solicit the sage advice of my dear readers)

Update: The winner, by one vote, is Cozé. Thanks to everyone who voted!

You read it right. My big holiday gift this year was a generous gift certificate to Lucky Scent, run by the good people behind L.A.’s brick-and-mortar Scent Bar, where I once spent almost three hours on a stool sniffing whatever the patient ‘bartender’ could think to hand me before I made off with a bottle of Sel de Vetiver (it was December, but Celine Ellena’s beach-skin and salted caramel miracle made enough sense on the West Coast to warrant the splurge).

But now I need your help, reader. As I mentioned in my last post, I hate making decisions, so I’ve turned to you (and to Polldaddy) to help me decide how I should spend my Lucky Scent dollars. I’ve already winnowed down my initial list of around two dozen candidates by eliminating any scents I can buy locally in New York (Fille en Aiguilles, Sienne L’Hiver, Shiloh, anything from Le Labo or CB I Hate Perfume) and, in a mostly gestural nod to practicality, anything that’s occasional, extravagant or simply expensive enough that I couldn’t bring myself to drop my own hard-earned dollars on it, much less 'free' money (Absolue Pour le Soir, Stoned, Comme des Garçons x Stephen Jones, etc.). Maybe that’s the kind of thing gift certificates are for, but I’m determined to buy something I’ll get a lot of mileage out of, so to speak, rather than something merely to prove what a robust aficionado I am.

The elimination process has left me, bizarrely, with a choice between two scents from the same house: Pierre Guillaume’s Parfumerie Générale.  I’ve been acquainting myself slowly with Guillaume’s numbered portfolio and “Private Collection” of fragrances, and have grown to recognize the ultra high-quality sense of cohesion in them, which no doubt arises from his background as a skilled chemist. His technical prowess goes beyond the expert linking of disparate ingredients to the interaction of those ingredients with environmental factors like light and heat; many of his scents utilize a proprietary process called “photo-affinage,” whereby “olfactory peaks”  are smoothed out by ultraviolet radiation. He’s also the pioneering beneficiary of a new extraction technology that’s enabled him to plant alarmingly accurate fresh fruit accords among the "olfactory spheres" in his newly-launched second brand, Huitième Art Parfums.

Guillaume’s body of work appeals to me not because it’s the work of a “rockstar” like Francis Kurkdjian or even an avant-gardist like Geza Schoen or the Antoines (Lie & Maisondieu), but because it’s the work of a committed nerd – albeit a French nerd, meaning a sexy one. Rather than proposing the sort of arch-cerebral, almost confrontational ideas that sprout incessantly in the overcrowded world of niche perfumery (ambrox trend, anyone?), he reserves his skill and talent for exploring subtle, precious moods and emotions with a cartographer's precision.

And with apologies for that sycophantic introduction, here are the two candidates:

Private Collection: L’Ombre Fauve
Its name translates to something like “beastly shadow”, and true to form, this scent is dark, dense and alternately scary and cuddly. The official list of five notes (amber, musks, wood, incense and patchouli) suggests a simple, minimal construction – a notion quickly belied by the sheer opulence of the experience, from the first spray to the lingering whiff you’ll get on your coat collar two days later. Animalic musks and patchouli do much to expand the powdery amber and wood, but the true heart of L’Ombre Fauve is an otherworldly tint or texture that repeatedly makes the quietest of entrances and exits. Many fans call it the “fur” or “wild animal” note. Some call it “metallic.” Luca Turin (a fan himself) calls it “raspy.” Whatever it is, however he did it, Guillaume managed to make a sweet ambery oriental that doesn’t bore me to tears after ten minutes.

02: Cozé
Despite its salutatorian name, Cozé is actually the fragrance that launched Parfumerie Générale. Originally a blend that Guillaume had created solely for his own and his father’s personal use, it caught the attention of a Swiss art collector and perfume enthusiast who all but demanded it for himself and his circle of connoisseurs. Surprisingly easy to wear, Cozé subjects the dozy herbal funk of PG’s exclusive hemp seed oil extraction to a Kevyn Aucoin-worthy makeover involving heady pimento, camphoreous patchouli and an especially bitter dose of coffee and chocolate. A heavily-refined mossiness sets the overall tone – somewhere between a misty forest and a hotboxed Bentley. “Hippie luxury,” this scent seems to argue, is not a contradiction.

And now to the poll! Thanks for reading and voting, and of course, feel free to suggest other ideas in the poll box or in comments.

Winter Wardrobe, Part 2: Wishlist

One of the most maddening things about being a collector is that it’s never a straight line from one absolute desire to the next. Too many desires happen simultaneously, tugging mind and wallet in all different directions. Because I both hate making decisions and think about things too much, I try to separate the fragrances I want into those that are reasonably accessible to me and those that are perpetually out of reach, whether due to price or availability. And with that dreary explanation, here are three exquisite scents that I can’t seem to get my hands on:

Maison Francis Kurkdjian Absolue Pour le Soir ($2.50 / milliliter)
I’ve actually never smelled Cologne Pour le Soir, from which Absolue draws its foundation (a creamy, benzoin-heavy amber accord, incense, rose and honey), but I already know I prefer Absolue. I’m convinced that this foundation only makes its mark at full tilt, as it is in the latter. The magic-hour hue of that sticky, sweet core gets darkened several shades by cumin, sandalwood and an unmistakably dirty civet that’s earned Absolue many a carnal-themed review and the title “Skankfest of the Year."

My reasons for keeping it off the immediate buy list? A) I already own Musks Kublaï Khan, which is enough of a “skankfest-sweet-oriental” showpiece already, and B) $175 is too much to spend on something I could only get away with four days out of the year. Still, I do pine for those zinc bottle caps…


Mark Buxton Around Midnight ($1.73 / milliliter, according to current Euro exchange rate)
I know I said in the last post that Annick Menardo is my perennial number one among perfumers, but I was a Mark Buxton groupie first (as I also mentioned in the last post, the first perfume I loved was 2 Man, easily Buxton’s best for Comme des Garçons). To my surprise, Around Midnight is the only scent from Buxton’s eponymous collection that seems to be anywhere near my own wavelength.

I’ve read people describe it as a stylistic chameleon, moving eerily from aromatic fougere territory to chypre to oriental. You could certainly think of it that way, especially if you never want to actually enjoy it. Or you could just stop thinking and take in the pepper and chamomile (fresh and aromatic like lavender but without that Irish Spring sourness that gives me the heebs), the brilliantly structural (versus ornamental) jasmine, and a powdery wood-amber base.

The overarching sense I get isn’t all that chameleonic. While there doesn’t seem to be a discrete incense note per se, there is very much an incense ‘feel’ or character that lingers over most of the development; a smoky haze obscuring and blending a disparate (and quite saturated) riot of color, and a very familiar Buxton effect. 

I’ve enjoyed my tiny sample of Around Midnight down to its last drop, and with Lucky Scent now sold out of it, I can only turn to First in Fragrance, where as you may have guessed, I would have to pay out the nose in Euros. The last time I ordered a scent from Germany I paid €19 - nineteen! - for standard shipping and it took three weeks and two trips to the post office in Bed-Stuy to get it. Whee.

Tom Ford Private Blend Italian Cypress ($3.80 / milliliter)
This is terribly handsome, utterly desirable and very Tom Ford-priced juice. Imagine original Polo in a Tom Ford black tie look (and in case you’re thinking this is strictly a masculine exercise, it actually works for whichever gender you dress; ditto for the fragrance itself).

In lieu of a “Top 10 of 2010!” listicle (if you’re craving that kind of thing, you can go here or here or here or here), I'm presenting a list of things that feel direly inappropriate while wearing Italian Cypress:

• Spilling coffee on my sleeve while stumbling through a subway turnstile
• Tapping my foot to Blondie’s “Slow Motion” on the subway
• Being on the subway at all
• Being clumsy enough to give myself a papercut
• Wearing a sweater I didn’t realize was completely covered in lint
• Sniffling, sneezing or any other sign of infirmity
• Being under 5’10”
• Cheap underwear
• Cheap anything
• Eating dinner alone

In other words, wearing Italian Cypress with any kind of regularity would probably result in some very unnecessary self-esteem issues. Happy New Year!

Winter Wardrobe, Part 1: What I’m Wearing Now

I started this post before the East Coast blizzard that smothered 50 million people. Unable to get a flight from Georgia back to New York, I was a bit sad not to take part in that scary but thrilling moment when all New Yorkers' delusions of a "mild winter" start to buckle. Now those delusions have been blown cleanly away, and all I get to enjoy is the aftermath, peeking cautiously around hills of plowed snow before I slosh across the street.

The silver lining, as you might suspect, is that I love scents that suit the cold -- the smoky woods and soft, heavy ambers and resins; the oddity of sillage blooming intensely when you walk inside instead of out. My taste in the frigid months leans toward the contemplative and the cozy and my tolerance for the gourmand expands. Here are a few scents where those inclinations have led me so far:

Le Labo Pathchouli 24

May I take a brief moment to share my boundless admiration for Annick Ménardo, my all-time perfumer crush? Her style, to my nose, manages to be both familiar and startling -- familiar because of the uncanny olfactory impressions she paints (the root beer of Hypnotic Poison or the rubber of Bvlgari Black) and startling in the depth and immediacy of one’s emotional reaction to those impressions. Okay fine, that’s waxing way too poetic, but frankly I challenge you to give yourself a spray of Bois d’Argent and not think immediately of milk and honey (or, in my memory, milk and Cap’n Crunch).

She’s been called the “David Lynch of perfumery”, and accordingly, when she goes niche she doesn’t just go. She sprints. Which brings us nicely ‘round to Patchouli 24 for Le Labo. Administering a blatant overdose of birch tar and styrax with such precision and balance clearly takes technical expertise. But underneath that up-front toughness, the aching, lonesome beauty of campfire smoke, glove leather and a faint VapoRub effect remains one of the most convincing arguments ever made that perfumers are fine artists. Much has been said about the dry vanillic ‘smell of old books’ aspect that underpins the heart of Patchouli 24, but my favorite effect is the lingering sensation that something nearby is smoldering, in a good way.

Frederic Malle Bois d’Orage / French Lover

There are exceptions to the tastes I described above. On some cold days -- bright ones in particular -- I like to wear something as sharp and invigorating as the weather, rather than a figurative blanket to comfort against it. Those days I’ve been choosing Pierre Bourdin’s brilliant interpretation of angelica for Frederic Malle: Bois d’Orage (“thunder wood”), or as it’s known in non-American markets, French Lover. The opening is indeed bright with ultra-green galbanum and pimento; the heart and later phases are marked by a medium-warm cedar, discreetly extended by vetiver and iris. Those two branches support the star ingredient, amplifying both the spicy and musky aspects of the angelica while keeping them securely linked. Dry without being thin, masculine without being animalic, every-day wearable but dressy enough for a winter wedding; it’s like a waxed cotton utility jacket that magically reverses into a tuxedo.

Penhaligon’s Opus 1870

This was my second perfume love affair (after Comme des Garçons 2 Man). This is a classic chypre pulled carefully and thoughtfully into the 21st century. This is an old sweater that only gets better with age.

I can’t for the life of me find who actually authored the perfume, but whoever it was struck gold. The whole composition, from the citrus-black pepper opening through the mossy rose-and-incense heart to the cinnamon-dusted base woods, glows like a dimmed Edison bulb hanging over a white marble bar. A fair amount of people (myself included) consider this one of Penhaligon’s best, but it also seems to fly under the radar, especially relative to the house’s splashier new Duchaufours (Amaranthine and Sartorial), and truth be told I’m glad for that. In addition to having one of the best cedar drydowns I’ve ever encountered, Opus is one of the best secrets I’ve ever kept.

The Sweet Smell of Unboxing: Gizmodo Explains 'New Gadget Smell'

Gadget site Gizmodo looked into the origins of 'new gadget smell', which I happen to adore in the same way one might thrill to the smell of gasoline. It's actually not the gadgets themselves but the smell of the packaging material, in this particular case an EVA injected foam similar to what Crocs are made from. Read the full post here.

I'm convinced that 'new gadget smell' would be perfect as a facet of the 'Fanboy' concept I dreamed up in my last post: futuristic and proudly unnatural, perhaps mixed with some latex or PVC notes for an unironic cosplay reference?

Image from ntr23's Flickr photostream.

Feed Your Inner Fanboy: Etat Libre d’Orange Homage Series

I’m desperately trying to squeeze another post in before September ends, in part because I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like the archive list to suggest I’m more prolific a blogger than I am, and also because one of these fragrances launched this month. Since I’ve very little time left, I’ll try to make it quick.

I know it might seem a little heavy on the Etat Libre d’Orange here, to the point that one could call me a ELd’O fanboy, but I tell you, Etienne de Swardt helms one of the few perfume brands that take real risks and make hefty statements. Additionally, I get a feeling that it’s the kind of brand that wouldn’t mind its admirers being referred to as ‘fanboys.’ (Come to think of it, Fanboy would be a great name for an ELd’O fragrance.) That’s probably because they do it themselves, having slowly but steadily produced a series of special editions that pay tribute to various artists, most recently including Tilda Swinton’s Like This.

The series started, though, with Tom of Finland, dedicated to the erotic artist -- a cool and bright lemon splashed over a muddle of iris, vanilla, tonka, suede notes and resins, spiked with sharp and/or green notes, like pine, saffron, pepper and galbanum. A dose of aldehydes makes it smell clean and raunchy at the same time.

The second in the series is named for Rossy de Palma, the Spanish actress best known for her roles in Almodóvar films. The scent, I think, is the best in the series, including the two new ones I’m discussing below. Givaudan whizzes Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu, both credited for this one, took a classically beautiful Bulgarian rose and made up its face into almost a drag version of itself, using smooth, milky spices (ginger and cardamom), a slightly slutty jasmine, clean patchouli and cocoa. 

I had an opportunity earlier in the summer to smell the fourth and fifth in the series, which are both being launched this season. The ‘holiday’ timeframe will see the release of Josephine Baker,  a sweet-citrusy, cheekily ‘tropical’ confection that smells like a coconut foam. But the 10th of this month saw the release of Sex Pistols, and while I bet any actual Sex Pistols fanboy would engage in a good bit of teeth-gnashing if s/he came across the twee plaid-capped bottle, it’s the better of these two by a mile. Up front it’s lemon and some very strong black pepper, which lingers admirably through an odd-but-it-works dried fruit note (“prune” as you’ll see if you scrutinize the graphic up close), some faint leather and patchouli, a nicely funky ambrette, and the heliotrope that wraps it all together. Like in Tom of Finland, some aldehydes of the fatty variety soap things up a bit and keep the jammy prune note and sweet heliotrope from feeling too dense. 

Hey, I got through it all with a half-hour left before October starts!

Etat Libre d’Orange Sex Pistols is available at Henri Bendel in New York. Most of their other fragrances are available online at Lucky Scent.

Telling Stories: Gorilla Perfume Pop-Up Shop and Gallery

(Updated with further thoughts on The Smell of Weather Turning)

My trudging work week ended yesterday with an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. The earth-loving artisans at Lush turned three floors of a building on Crosby street into a makeshift gallery to launch a number of new scents in their Gorilla Perfume fragrance line. Groovy!

The exhibit comprised a series of rooms dedicated to particular fragrances, each one furnished with an illustration of what inspired the scent (live dancers in one room, audio recordings of thunder in another, a bubble machine, dirty bathroom sinks, etc.) and a VERY friendly storyteller ready to translate smell into narrative.

In my typically nerdy fashion, I prodded these ladies and gentlemen for as much nerdy detail about the perfumes as I could, but they seemed far better-versed in the stories than the hard facts. After a while I didn’t even mind, because the stories (all drawn from the global adventures of Lush co-founder Mark Constantine and his son Simon, who author the perfumes themselves) were at the very least entertaining, and more importantly, in most cases they really did seem to relate to the final product, rather than feeling like a cut-throat marketing move. Kudos to these Willy Wonkas, then, for giving their scents more of a soul than one is apt to find in most perfume these days.

A fine example is The Smell of Freedom, which combines three olfactory portraits of people who have suffered extreme hardship into a ‘triptych’ of sorts. The scents were based on a Tibetan monk (clove, black pepper, ginger-honey tea), an Australian Aboriginal (fire tree, lemon myrtle, lemongrass) and a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner (oudh, jasmine, orris and sustainable Australian sandalwood). Each of the three portraits is available as a perfume oil in addition to the combined scent sold in an atomizer bottle.

Other highlights were the new Imogen Rose, a blushing Damascus rose swathed in vetiver, bergamot and soft ambrette; Dirty, a slyly marine-tilting alternative to Axe aimed at unshowered dudes; and three custom scents blended for an actress, an heiress and a dutchess (all of whose hair Mark Constantine had tended to in the 70s), each made available to the public for the first time and exclusively at this gallery for a properly luxurious $2,400 a pop.

My clear favorite, though, and the one that coaxed my credit card from the safety of my wallet, is The Smell of Weather Turning. The perfumers were encouraged to create this ‘thunderstorm in reverse’ by an employee of theirs who is also a white witch. They drew further inspiration from the musician Simon Emmerson, who is a member of an order of druids, as well as a dream Mark Constantine had at an Iron Age inn in Finland where they were fed nettles and dark rye bread.

All of these experiences led Mark to insist on only using materials that would have been available 5,000 years ago in the fragrance, and they pulled it off with aplomb.  Weather Turning turns up an herbal bouquet of English peppermint, chamomile and nettle that anchors quickly to a heart of stately oakwood mixed with what I smell as mossy notes, which provide just the slightest hint of marine saltiness. These first phases bring it initially close to Dirty, an older scent from Lush’s now-closed Be Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful line that Luca Turin dubbed “marine mint.” Where the newer scent differs is in the sweet hay and beeswax absolutes underneath, as warm and dry as anyone could want. The combination imparts both a vague smokiness and creaminess to the last (and longest-lasting) phase, and the beeswax seems to fix the entire composition in place. Those herbs that kick everything off don’t so much collapse into this last phase as they do sink slowly into it, such that one can still apprehend their dull silhouette many hours after their opening act. Minty scents rarely work well on my skin, but Weather Turning marks a bewitching (see what I did there?) halfway point between fresh and cozy. Wearing it out of the exhibit, it actually made me feel at home in the otherwise oppressively humid, pre-storm Manhattan night.

Some of the Gorilla perfumes will be available in Lush stores, but all of them, aside from the “three ladies”, can be purchased from the Gorilla Perfume website in 30 ml bottles or as solids. Many of the former Be Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful perfumes (Dirty and Ladyboy among them) are also available on the site.

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.