Authors: Molly Birnbaum
I sniffed each blotter, one at a time. I could smell every one. But when it came time to write down their names, I struggled. I inhaled scents that seemed at first spicy, and then warm, or perhaps minty? Maybe with some wood? I stared at the sheets of paper with lists of categories, descriptors of scent.
How the hell do these aid in my memory?
I inhaled and exhaled, closing my eyes, trying to let the scent waft casually up to my brain, trying not to impede my recognition with panic, but I couldn’t help myself. With each inhale that I didn’t recognize, with each one that could be sandalwood or jasmine or lavender, who knows, I felt a little bit more wild, a little bit more out of control.
Without the verbal cues, without the guidance and instruction, my sense of smell, so celebrated only minutes before, became slack and unwise. I felt like I was trying to walk through a maze in the pitch-black dark. I opened my eyes and began to search for clues in the faces of my classmates, in the size of the bottle in our teacher’s hand. With each inhale that I couldn’t identify, my panic escalated. Notch after notch, I could barely think outside the internal scream:
You’ll never learn!
When Fauvel went over the correct answers, I braced myself. Instead of cedarwood, I wrote galbanum. I mistook tuberose for rose. I thought petitgrain was jasmine, and lavender petitgrain. I had failed.
IN FRENCH,
the word for “to smell” is
sentir.
Pronounced sahn-teer, it hovers on the roof of the mouth like a hum. A word with dual meaning. Also, “to feel.”
It’s an important overlap, Fauvel told me one late afternoon toward the end of my time at perfume school. We were sitting on the porch overlooking Grasse, drinking fragrant cups of hot green tea despite the warmth of the fading day.
“In perfume, we don’t speak,” she said. “But smell is a way of communication.”
Fauvel began to work in fragrance at a young age. Like many perfumers whom I’ve met, she has strong memories of the scents of her childhood near Grasse: the garden, her mother’s perfume, the floral lotion worn by a teacher at school. Fauvel’s father worked for a fragrance company, one of the gargantuan perfume companies in town, and she would often accompany him around.
In France, perfume is traditionally a family affair, a career handed down from father to son. But as a woman, Fauvel was not so encouraged. “My father explained to me the job and said maybe it is a job for a man,” she said in her cautious accent. But she knew what she wanted. “I said, I don’t care.”
Once she began to work in the industry, Fauvel moved up the ladder like most perfumers: one tiny step at a time. She trained hard. She smelled constantly, continually. She studied the raw materials and their interactions. She memorized formulas and worked on accords, or simple combinations of raw scent notes blended together to form a coherent whole, and imitations. She watched experienced perfumers create from scratch. She learned about prices, legislation, colors, and mass-market techniques. She learned about cosmetics, shampoo, and how the alternative mediums change the chemical formulas. Just like Grosinger in the world of flavor, step by step she repeated.
But it all begins by memorizing the raw materials, Fauvel told me. This can take a long time. Perhaps it is a study that never ends.
“How long does it take to feel comfortable?” I asked.
“Maybe five years,” she said. “But after ten? Then you can play.”
Fauvel, who is still relatively young within the hierarchy of the industry, likes to play with rose and orris, cedarwood and sandalwood and ambroxan. She likes balance and harmony. She is inspired by food, and by travel, by color and by music. “It’s psychology, it’s medicine. It’s a sensibility,” she said.
In this, she’s not alone. Christophe Laudamiel has often been inspired by fleeting impressions to create his fragrances. He can invent a scent inspired by lines of poetry or the shade of gold in a woman’s necklace. He worked for years on the scents to accompany the film
Perfume
. No matter what, he once told me, it’s a personal thing. “You want to feel good and dynamic—even joyful—when you create a scent. And here it’s about your own education: what makes
you
feel joyful,” he said. For him it is citrus notes, which make him feel refreshed and dynamic, or fresh bergamot, the herb used in Earl Grey tea, which is bright without being too sweet or “jammy.”
Other perfumers create fragrance with inspiration from things that do not have a distinct or recognizable smell. Lisa Camasi, a botanical perfumer in California, tends to work from abstract ideas: poetry about the Phoenix or the color green. Gail Adrian, an aromatherapist and perfumer in New Jersey, creates her scents after the essence of personality and auras that she detects in her individual clients. Once aware of the power of smell, she said, there is a broader depth to how you see people and the world. “It’s much more intuitive sense, and with that comes much more of an emotional context,” she said.
Much of the commercial side of fragrance, however, is determined by more conventional inspiration—things like money, marketing, and PR. The industry has been suffering in the last decade, crumbling in the hands of a celebrity-driven consumer and an escalating number of new fragrances to launch.
Chandler Burr, former perfume critic for the
New York Times,
has written books on smell, including
The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York,
in which he follows the creation of a perfume for the actress Sarah Jessica Parker and of one for Hermès in France. He writes about the reality of the business, the underbelly to the magic of a beautiful scent: “The closest industry to perfume—in its protestations of artistic integrity and its manic attention to profits, in its ratio of limpid niche gems to ground-out meretricious mass market product, in the sums of money it risks, in its mating of visions and dreams to the bottom line—is Hollywood.”
Beneath the white noise of commercialism, perfume has long been cloaked in secrecy. This is in part because there is no protection against plagiarism in fragrance, like flavor. Copying already-known perfumes is part of the learning process. If perfumers do not keep their formulas hidden, another can easily subsume their creative work. But, I wondered, was this also to preserve the aura of art? If the public understands the chemicals, the naturals and synthetics, the mathematical formula, would they still appreciate its beauty?
Well, no, wrote Burr to me in an e-mail. “I’m an atheist, and atheists think the idea that you need the ‘mystery’ of God etc. in order to appreciate the beauty of the world is ridiculous,” he wrote. “What’s truly beautiful and awesome is reality and our search to understand it. Perfume has been coated in commercial marketing shit for a century. It’s grotesque. Take the art for what it is, understand it, and it only gains in beauty.”
Burr received wide criticism after being named the first (and only) perfume critic for the
Times,
implying that the public (or at least the media) viewed the art of scent as less worthy than the others. “Did that surprise you?” I asked.
“I understand that many people think that perfume, because it’s a hugely commercialized art form, is not an art form. The idea was completely new to most people. But saying that perfume is not an artistic medium is like saying film, which we mostly experience as commercial product, is not an artistic medium. It’s simply wrong.”
In fact, an increasing number of olfactory artists have been showing their work in mainstream venues. James Auger, whose playful work “Smell+,” which included a device to allow men and women to smell each other before meeting, was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008. Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian artist based in Berlin, has worked with smell for decades, notably in an exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called “The Fear of Smell—the Smell of Fear,” which involved collecting the underarm sweat from nine men in various states of anxiety, synthesizing each in the lab, and then applying them to strips of paint on the showroom wall, where visitors could partake with a gentle touch. I spoke with Maki Ueda, an artist in Holland, whose work was included in a 2008 gallery show in Sunderland, England, called “If There Ever Was, An Exhibition of Extinct and Impossible Smells.” Here, among the scents of the Hiroshima atomic blast and one to make a woman beautiful forever imagined by perfumers and artists from around the world, Ueda created the fragrance of the body odor of political suspects in East Germany, stored in jars by the Stasi in order to later track them with dogs. “Constructing a smell is like composing music,” Ueda told me. Burr wrote of the show in the
New York Times Style Magazine.
“The first thing you should know about olfactory works of art—scents made by artists who work not in paint or clay but in the medium of scent—is their rare, visceral beauty,” Burr began. And “ . . . someday MoMA will recognize an entirely new category of art,” he concluded, “perhaps the most viscerally, instinctively powerful art form we will ever experience.”
Denis Dutton, author of
The
Art Instinct,
believes that humans are not wired to think of smell as art, not in the way that we use sound or sight. Why? Because of our ability and tendency to build structures in the mind. We can remember words, sounds, and images. We structure them logically in our head, whether through the narrative of a novel or the melody to a song. But how do we create meaning in a sample of fifty smells? As I knew all too well, it was hard. There is something about smell that defies structure, as well as something about sound that invites it. He quotes philosopher Monroe Beardsley, who wrote: “This, and not the view that smell and taste are ‘lower senses’ compared with sight and hearing seems to explain the absence of taste-symphonies and smell-sonatas.”
Well, not a complete absence.
In the late spring of 2009, I descended a ramp at the foot of the Guggenheim Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and took a seat in an auditorium lit softly with green. Each chair was outfitted with a spindly metal microphone. This was not a microphone for sound, however. This one was for scent.
I had arrived for the third performance of “Green Aria: A ScentOpera,” written by Stewart Matthew and composed by Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson. This was a musical opera, but one without voice. There would be no lyrics or words. Instead, there would be smell. Laudamiel, who sat on the stage before the performance began wearing patent red leather sneakers and a metal-studded belt, had invented unique smells to represent thirty-five characters, effectively standing in for lyrics. They would be piped through the microphone throughout the forty-minute piece, each representing a different character.
When the performance began, I leaned forward in my seat so as to best position my nose for perception. I needn’t have worried. Each scent, piped one at a time into the room, came in time to the music. Each scent played a role in a rather unintelligible aria about the rise of technology, as the prologue had informed the audience with words cast against a screen. The music was at times beautiful, and I fell into the low, melodic notes that came with the deep salty scent of “Water.” I closed my eyes and willed my mind to focus only on smell and sound, awash with some sort of invisible color.
There were green notes to some smells, reminiscent of grass—ripe and clean. The “Fresh Air” character felt remarkably light while the “Funky Green Imposter,” which always arrived alongside a playful little jazz riff, was sweet and sticky, like bitter moss. There was “Base Metal” and “Shiny Steel,” “Wind” and “Earth” and “Fire.” As I smelled I saw images: colors of blue, of dark green and brown. I saw trees and clouds. Something, at one point, reminded me of my father. Later, I saw a mustache in the air.
At the end of the show, the audience clapped. A bit halfheartedly, I thought. I looked around. No one seemed to know how to react.
Afterward, I walked down Fifth Avenue toward the subway and home. I took my time, looking at the large windows of upscale apartment buildings overlooking Central Park, window-shopping boutiques. I inhaled the damp-plastic scent of the vegetable stand that I passed on my way, and then the exhaust from a truck at a red light. I walked by a man smoking a cigar on a corner, and I could smell an aluminum edge to the aroma, which reminded me of the opera’s heady Metal character. As I continued to walk, I sought out the operatic elements to the scents surrounding me. They were everywhere, I realized—the Wind note to the subway tunnel, the Earth of Central Park.
AFTER THE FIFTH DAY
of school at the Grasse Institute, I felt saturated in scent. My nose screamed in protest. I wanted to quit.
Every day that first week had been filled with raw materials. We had smelled. And then we smelled some more. One blotter after another, one potent scent at a time. We smelled, and we tested, and then we smelled again. We smelled until my brain ached and I thought my forehead would melt down to my chin. We smelled until smelling became abstract.
By 6:00
P.M.
I couldn’t distinguish the difference between cedryl acetate, the synthetic equivalent of cedarwood, and aldehyde C 16, which smelled of a powdery pink strawberry. I felt like I was floating. When I arrived at my room that evening, I collapsed onto my bed. But then I heard the soft ping of an incoming call on Skype, the Internet-based video system that occasionally allowed me to speak with Matt, who had been stationed in Gardez, a small mountain town on the Pakistan border. For the moment his base held a relatively sound Internet connection and Skype allowed me to see him in his desert-stained uniform, dim in the fluorescent light of his office, his rifle perched on a shelf behind.
It had taken almost a week before I told anyone in Grasse that I had a boyfriend at war. The language barrier between my classmates and I was sometimes steep, and we avoided talk of war or politics, newspapers or books, family or friends. We stuck to smell.
But just that afternoon, in fact, I stood with the aromatherapist during our break for lunch while she told me about her work. She spoke of clients who had experienced shock or pain, and which scents she could use to help. Once a man came in for a scented massage when she worked in a department store in London, she said. He had asked her to massage his stomach with essential oil.