"Celebrity" By Luca Turin
Perhaps more as a wishful thought than a sober one, I have so far taken the view that celebrity fragrances could be no worse than average, which is to say pretty bad. I was shocked to find out recently that I was wrong: a UK tabloid journalist arranged a smelling session of all the latest ones, and it was instructive to smell them one after the other. They were uniformly awful, cynically cheap compositions in ugly packaging, the saddest, cheesiest objects this side of the girl’s section in a toy store. They were also unusually bad value for money: twenty euros’ worth of celebrity fragrance gets you a fabric softener stink, while twice the money gets you the smallest-size Guerlain, a leap equivalent to going from The Eagles to Beethoven.
In the UK at least, celebrity fragrances have simply become as bad as any fragrance ever gets. But then, celebrities themselves have taken a turn for the worse. I have never understood the educated surprise at the fame of athletes, actors and explorers, since it dates back to antiquity and by now we should have gotten used to it. What is new and remarkable is that celebrity has become sexually transmissible, as if some spirochaete were responsible. We are now dealing with the wives, and in some cases the husbands of famous people: footballers have girlfriends, the girlfriends have names, the names become brands and pretty soon some thirteen-year-old girl in Sunderland steals two tenners from her mother’s purse to smell terrible.
But on reflection, that’s not new either. In some ways the famous now embody all the absurd eminence of aristocracy: complete independence from talent, transmissibility by name, elevation by marriage, ready convertibility of prestige into cash, automatic admittance to the demi-monde. They trade the elusive quality of being, as opposed to merely having. The rich want fame, and the famous want cash. It is arguably more common to be rich and obscure than poor and famous, and in any event fame can be converted into money more easily than the other way around: consider what Paris Hilton had to endure to go from stinking rich to stinking famous.
After all, if Prince Charles makes Duchy Originals biscuits, why should Wayne Rooney’s girlfriend not make a fragrance? And when you smell them all and discover that the only ones that don’t make you retch are by Jennifer Lopez and Sarah Jessica Parker, is that not a reflection of the fact that the US is charmingly middle class, with stars that can act, sing and dance, that care about their image and oversee their products?
On this side of the ocean, the celebrities do not concern themselves with such trivia: they are content to merely exist, and for little pieces of their lifestyle to be traded like fake relics of the saints. When the tabloid wrote up the piece, they came back to me to ask what I thought of No. 5. They seemed to think it was Nicole Kidman’s celebrity fragrance. Mademoiselle Chanel would be amused.
February 1, 2009
January 1, 2009
"Purification" By Luca Turin
"Purification" By Luca Turin
The idea that adding something can take something away is magic. Air fresheners rely on this, for example in toilets where bad smells in a small space will be somehow subtracted by good smells coming from a spray can with a picture of the Alps on it. It works with spirits, i.e. metaphysical farts, as well. My mother lived in a haunted flat for a while, where strange noises, sensations and moved objects made her life miserable until she used a Lampe Berger, that wonderful flameless burner invented a century ago, and filled it with a Patricia de Nicolai scent. Things calmed down instantly.
This is the rationale behind Papier d’Arménie, blotting paper steeped in benzoin resin you find in the form of green and yellow booklets in French Tabacs. The booklet says “burn it in hotel rooms where unclean individuals have sojourned before you”, a clearly magical instruction. But to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, any magic will sooner or later will become indistinguishable from technology.
An improvement on Papier d’Arménie, closer to real effectiveness, is Ozium, a mysterious fluid in a striped spray can of pure ‘fifties design, three shades of light blue, with the cursive inscription “Glycolized”. According to Ozium’s makers “Each use will release a pleasant fragrance that kills odor-causing bacteria and converts smoke particles into clean, fresh air”. We are still close to magic, but in my experience Ozium works rather well.
Then, without much fuss, after centuries of rituals there came technology. Procter and Gamble’s Febreze contains cyclodextrins, cup-shaped molecules that actually attach to odors. Oddly, as a sort of homage to past magic, P&G still puts fragrance in it, which must complicate things. The stuff works so well guys in the US spray their clothes with it instead of washing them, a fine example of unintended consequences of both magic and technology.
The idea that adding something can take something away is magic. Air fresheners rely on this, for example in toilets where bad smells in a small space will be somehow subtracted by good smells coming from a spray can with a picture of the Alps on it. It works with spirits, i.e. metaphysical farts, as well. My mother lived in a haunted flat for a while, where strange noises, sensations and moved objects made her life miserable until she used a Lampe Berger, that wonderful flameless burner invented a century ago, and filled it with a Patricia de Nicolai scent. Things calmed down instantly.
This is the rationale behind Papier d’Arménie, blotting paper steeped in benzoin resin you find in the form of green and yellow booklets in French Tabacs. The booklet says “burn it in hotel rooms where unclean individuals have sojourned before you”, a clearly magical instruction. But to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, any magic will sooner or later will become indistinguishable from technology.
An improvement on Papier d’Arménie, closer to real effectiveness, is Ozium, a mysterious fluid in a striped spray can of pure ‘fifties design, three shades of light blue, with the cursive inscription “Glycolized”. According to Ozium’s makers “Each use will release a pleasant fragrance that kills odor-causing bacteria and converts smoke particles into clean, fresh air”. We are still close to magic, but in my experience Ozium works rather well.
Then, without much fuss, after centuries of rituals there came technology. Procter and Gamble’s Febreze contains cyclodextrins, cup-shaped molecules that actually attach to odors. Oddly, as a sort of homage to past magic, P&G still puts fragrance in it, which must complicate things. The stuff works so well guys in the US spray their clothes with it instead of washing them, a fine example of unintended consequences of both magic and technology.
December 1, 2008
"Moving parts" By Luca Turin
"Moving parts" By Luca Turin
Some years ago, in collaboration with a strange and charming guy who appeared in my office one day and later turned out to be a fantasist, I became interested in the possibility of developing an electronically controlled perfume spray. The idea was to use inkjet technology to spray fragrance rather than color. The cartridge would hold four different fragrance bases and spray them in different proportions on your skin according to the software settings. These could in turn follow the time of day, or your mood, or the seasons. The whole thing would fit in the palm of your hand and look like something you’d found in the duty-free of the Starship Enterprise.
Considering how inept we were, the idea went remarkably far: we met engineers from the admirable firm of Hewlett Packard at Chicago O’Hare airport, we saw people from Estée Lauder, Avon, the Body Shop, and we got a lot of technical help from what was then Quest International. At one point Christopher Sheldrake split up one of his fragrances (Tocadilly, if my memory serves me) for me to fill empty inkjet cartridges provided by HP and print invisible fragrance squares onto a white sheet of A4. It worked, and could no doubt have been developed into a workable, possibly desirable, maybe even successful device.
But it didn’t, and the reasons are interesting. Everyone hated this thing. Perfumers didn’t like the notion that anyone should be able to adjust their compositions. Executives at beauty firms, chiefly women, hated batteries being included. Though we tried to make the thing look like perfume rather than a GPS it was still a gadget, and ultimately, electrical devices are boy stuff. The notion of a fragrance player made by Sony in which fragrance would be software was anathema to image-obsessed perfume firms.
Conversely, technology firms were wary of the fickle world of fashion. What is remarkable is that clever devices are now abundant in plug-in room smells, piezoelectric sprays with little fans, wax CDs heated by a laser and much else, while the fine fragrance end still sticks to the archaic candle, with all its technical limitations. This at a time when every woman walks down the street speaking into a device with more computing power than the first IBM 360. I think times may be ready to change: one of these days Chanel will team up with Nokia, ask Philippe Starck to design the Zero and sell plug-ins of 5, 18, 19, 22 and other integers.
Some years ago, in collaboration with a strange and charming guy who appeared in my office one day and later turned out to be a fantasist, I became interested in the possibility of developing an electronically controlled perfume spray. The idea was to use inkjet technology to spray fragrance rather than color. The cartridge would hold four different fragrance bases and spray them in different proportions on your skin according to the software settings. These could in turn follow the time of day, or your mood, or the seasons. The whole thing would fit in the palm of your hand and look like something you’d found in the duty-free of the Starship Enterprise.
Considering how inept we were, the idea went remarkably far: we met engineers from the admirable firm of Hewlett Packard at Chicago O’Hare airport, we saw people from Estée Lauder, Avon, the Body Shop, and we got a lot of technical help from what was then Quest International. At one point Christopher Sheldrake split up one of his fragrances (Tocadilly, if my memory serves me) for me to fill empty inkjet cartridges provided by HP and print invisible fragrance squares onto a white sheet of A4. It worked, and could no doubt have been developed into a workable, possibly desirable, maybe even successful device.
But it didn’t, and the reasons are interesting. Everyone hated this thing. Perfumers didn’t like the notion that anyone should be able to adjust their compositions. Executives at beauty firms, chiefly women, hated batteries being included. Though we tried to make the thing look like perfume rather than a GPS it was still a gadget, and ultimately, electrical devices are boy stuff. The notion of a fragrance player made by Sony in which fragrance would be software was anathema to image-obsessed perfume firms.
Conversely, technology firms were wary of the fickle world of fashion. What is remarkable is that clever devices are now abundant in plug-in room smells, piezoelectric sprays with little fans, wax CDs heated by a laser and much else, while the fine fragrance end still sticks to the archaic candle, with all its technical limitations. This at a time when every woman walks down the street speaking into a device with more computing power than the first IBM 360. I think times may be ready to change: one of these days Chanel will team up with Nokia, ask Philippe Starck to design the Zero and sell plug-ins of 5, 18, 19, 22 and other integers.
November 1, 2008
"Anthropine" By Luca Turin
"Anthropine" By Luca Turin
Some ideas are like swiss army knives: they do no single thing really well, but the attraction of having both a large toothpick and tiny axe to hand at all times proves irresistible. A few weeks ago I received a mysterious email from a homeopath near Karlsruhe. It drew my attention to a thing called Anthropine, which comes in small bottles with a label bearing the portrait of a bearded, late nineteenth-century man wearing the sort of oval glasses we now associate with forgotten operas, beef extract and prime numbers.
Anthropine turns out to be a army-knife hybrid of pheromones and homeopathy. The man with the glasses is called Gustav Jaeger, and he made a fortune by producing high-quality woolen clothes. His firm was seized from him in reparation by the Treaty of Versailles and survives to this day in the UK, still bearing his name. He was also Professor of zoology, histology, anthropology, physiology and microscopy at the university of Stuttgart. Jaeger was interested in wool and hair, and in particular in their ability to retain odors, familiar to smokers and adulterous spouses. He became convinced that wool clothes hung on to airborne messengers emitted by the wearers when in different moods, and that clothes worn by, say, a happy person might be of medical use in curing depression.
This is where homeopathy comes in: its axiom is that the less active principle you put in, the more potent it gets. This delusional notion (don’t bother to e-mail me if you disagree, or if you do please remember to dilute one part anger in a trillion parts sugar) has one huge advantage: a little goes a hell of a long way. Jaeger took small amounts of hair, diluted it vastly and made little globules.
At one point 23 different kinds of Anthropine globules were in production, arising variously from small samples of hair taken from the athlete Fritz Kapernick (Anthropine No.2, used for shortness of breath), an unnamed blonde virgin (No. 7 “exhilarating and invigorating”), and Franz Liszt (No.16, for stiff finger joints). Today, you can send a sample of your own hair to the makers of Anthropine and get globules back. What little is left of my hair could considerably improve the human condition: several women have reported being cured of an expensive and antisocial fondness for Givenchy’s Amarige after only one dose.
Some ideas are like swiss army knives: they do no single thing really well, but the attraction of having both a large toothpick and tiny axe to hand at all times proves irresistible. A few weeks ago I received a mysterious email from a homeopath near Karlsruhe. It drew my attention to a thing called Anthropine, which comes in small bottles with a label bearing the portrait of a bearded, late nineteenth-century man wearing the sort of oval glasses we now associate with forgotten operas, beef extract and prime numbers.
Anthropine turns out to be a army-knife hybrid of pheromones and homeopathy. The man with the glasses is called Gustav Jaeger, and he made a fortune by producing high-quality woolen clothes. His firm was seized from him in reparation by the Treaty of Versailles and survives to this day in the UK, still bearing his name. He was also Professor of zoology, histology, anthropology, physiology and microscopy at the university of Stuttgart. Jaeger was interested in wool and hair, and in particular in their ability to retain odors, familiar to smokers and adulterous spouses. He became convinced that wool clothes hung on to airborne messengers emitted by the wearers when in different moods, and that clothes worn by, say, a happy person might be of medical use in curing depression.
This is where homeopathy comes in: its axiom is that the less active principle you put in, the more potent it gets. This delusional notion (don’t bother to e-mail me if you disagree, or if you do please remember to dilute one part anger in a trillion parts sugar) has one huge advantage: a little goes a hell of a long way. Jaeger took small amounts of hair, diluted it vastly and made little globules.
At one point 23 different kinds of Anthropine globules were in production, arising variously from small samples of hair taken from the athlete Fritz Kapernick (Anthropine No.2, used for shortness of breath), an unnamed blonde virgin (No. 7 “exhilarating and invigorating”), and Franz Liszt (No.16, for stiff finger joints). Today, you can send a sample of your own hair to the makers of Anthropine and get globules back. What little is left of my hair could considerably improve the human condition: several women have reported being cured of an expensive and antisocial fondness for Givenchy’s Amarige after only one dose.
October 1, 2008
"Real Gardenia" By Luca Turin
"Real Gardenia" By Luca Turin
According to perfumery historian Octavian Coifan (look up his blog, there’s nothing the guy doesn’t know or won’t soon find out) real gardenia absolutes made by flowers, not chemists, were once available at huge cost. None has been seen since 1938, which is chronologically neat, because exactly seventy years later a gardenia oil has reappeared. It comes from a farm in Fusagasugà, Colombia, 48 km due southwest of Bogotà as the hummingbird flies. I became aware of its existence thanks to Trygve Harris who runs Enfleurage, a small New York City outfit specializing in top-notch essential oils.
Unlike many perfumery luminaries who claim to scour the world for exotic essences but never set foot outside Paris’s périphérique, Ms Harris really does ferret out extraordinary things from remote corners of the planet. She sent me a ml. of the gardenia oil, and a teaspoonful of the butter. The method by which these marvels were obtained is novel: an enfleurage in cold palm oil (there’s progress for you, classic enfleurage used pig suet exposed to vapors from the flowers). The fragrance oil is then extracted into alcohol and vacuum-distilled. The idea of this and all other low-temperature methods is to treat the flowers gently and capture the smell without loss or damage.
I’ll admit one of the few things I am cynical about is gardenia: I’ve smelled too many, from Chanel’s eponymous mess to Guerlain’s cruel joke, that smelled nothing like the real thing. Until proven innocent, I regard all “gardenias” as I do footprints of the Snowman, engines that run on vacuum energy or good wines from Savoie. When I put this one on the back of my hand, I was ready to vent my spleen yet again. For a few seconds, the oil had me puzzled, with an intense herbaceous topnote that my daughter would have called pasta, i.e. thyme and laurel.
Just as I was about to start griping, the most stunning gardenia hologram materialized before me, all present and correct, from bouquet de provence via tuberose to the famous mushroom note that makes gardenia so different from other white flowers. My next thought was unworthy of a university graduate and intermittently rational being. I know Darwin was right, I know creationists are wrong, I know everything beautiful in nature is there because of some screwup long ago. Yet when I smell gardenias, I hear a dry, Cambridge high-table voice that says: “You don’t seriously think this is an accident, do you?”.
Leserbriefe:
Zu Duftnote -- Real Gardenia - NZZ-Folio Gratis (10/08)
Ich lese die Duftnote jeden Monat mit grösstem Vergnügen. Nicht nur, weil ich ein Parfumfan bin, sondern auch, weil Luca Turin so brillant und witzig schreibt. Die Kolumne über die Gardenie war wieder einmal eine echte Trouvaille.
M. Reber, per E-Mail
According to perfumery historian Octavian Coifan (look up his blog, there’s nothing the guy doesn’t know or won’t soon find out) real gardenia absolutes made by flowers, not chemists, were once available at huge cost. None has been seen since 1938, which is chronologically neat, because exactly seventy years later a gardenia oil has reappeared. It comes from a farm in Fusagasugà, Colombia, 48 km due southwest of Bogotà as the hummingbird flies. I became aware of its existence thanks to Trygve Harris who runs Enfleurage, a small New York City outfit specializing in top-notch essential oils.
Unlike many perfumery luminaries who claim to scour the world for exotic essences but never set foot outside Paris’s périphérique, Ms Harris really does ferret out extraordinary things from remote corners of the planet. She sent me a ml. of the gardenia oil, and a teaspoonful of the butter. The method by which these marvels were obtained is novel: an enfleurage in cold palm oil (there’s progress for you, classic enfleurage used pig suet exposed to vapors from the flowers). The fragrance oil is then extracted into alcohol and vacuum-distilled. The idea of this and all other low-temperature methods is to treat the flowers gently and capture the smell without loss or damage.
I’ll admit one of the few things I am cynical about is gardenia: I’ve smelled too many, from Chanel’s eponymous mess to Guerlain’s cruel joke, that smelled nothing like the real thing. Until proven innocent, I regard all “gardenias” as I do footprints of the Snowman, engines that run on vacuum energy or good wines from Savoie. When I put this one on the back of my hand, I was ready to vent my spleen yet again. For a few seconds, the oil had me puzzled, with an intense herbaceous topnote that my daughter would have called pasta, i.e. thyme and laurel.
Just as I was about to start griping, the most stunning gardenia hologram materialized before me, all present and correct, from bouquet de provence via tuberose to the famous mushroom note that makes gardenia so different from other white flowers. My next thought was unworthy of a university graduate and intermittently rational being. I know Darwin was right, I know creationists are wrong, I know everything beautiful in nature is there because of some screwup long ago. Yet when I smell gardenias, I hear a dry, Cambridge high-table voice that says: “You don’t seriously think this is an accident, do you?”.
Leserbriefe:
Zu Duftnote -- Real Gardenia - NZZ-Folio Gratis (10/08)
Ich lese die Duftnote jeden Monat mit grösstem Vergnügen. Nicht nur, weil ich ein Parfumfan bin, sondern auch, weil Luca Turin so brillant und witzig schreibt. Die Kolumne über die Gardenie war wieder einmal eine echte Trouvaille.
M. Reber, per E-Mail
September 1, 2008
"Duftnote -- Two stinks" By Luca Turin
"Duftnote -- Two stinks" By Luca Turin
The Stazione Zoologica in Naples is one of my favorite places on earth. A solid, gracious 1872 building nestled among the trees of the seafront gardens in the heart of town, it looks like a provincial railway station transported by angels to a place with no rails. It was the first of its kind, imitated the world over to provide an excuse for scientists to work through the holidays. It is known locally as the Aquarium and houses local fauna bathed in natural light, unlike the garish nightclub for fish up the coast in Monaco.
I fell in love with it in 1974, when I went there for a few weeks as a very junior assistant to the great John Z Young. My job was to train octopus to do complex tasks, like recognize shapes dangled in their aquaria or count the grooves in perspex balls. The intelligence of octopus is not widely appreciated, partly because they have little chance to display it when diced in a seafood salad, partly because we tend to think of invertebrates as lower forms of life. But think they do, astonishingly well when in pristine shape. Professor Young used to take out chunks of their brains to figure out which did what. Even when severely damaged, the hologram inside their heads was still readable and they performed valiantly, though more slowly, in all the tests. Sometimes one of these poor creatures would die, and take revenge on us (my other job was to clean the tanks) by producing the most prodigiously bad smell in the world, a stench so revoltingly vile that it would keep us retching for minutes afterwards.
Years later I came back, this time given a little lab to play in, shared with two distinguished foreign scientists. The octopus were gone. We were unpacking our equipment when the Director of the station came to greet us. One of us asked where the store of clean seawater was to be found. We did not know this, but the Stazione had at great expense installed two pipes out to sea to pump it in from the depths. Seawater was now on tap, and with a proud flourish and a smile the director opened one of the taps, which had never been used. For an interminable minute, out hissed and spluttered a mile-long slug of pestilential gas interspersed with random bits of brown gunk, filling the room with a very familiar smell. By the time clear water came, we were all on the terrace retching. There must have been laughter in octopus heaven.
Luca Turin ist Forschungsleiter bei Flexitral Inc.; er lebt in London.
The Stazione Zoologica in Naples is one of my favorite places on earth. A solid, gracious 1872 building nestled among the trees of the seafront gardens in the heart of town, it looks like a provincial railway station transported by angels to a place with no rails. It was the first of its kind, imitated the world over to provide an excuse for scientists to work through the holidays. It is known locally as the Aquarium and houses local fauna bathed in natural light, unlike the garish nightclub for fish up the coast in Monaco.
I fell in love with it in 1974, when I went there for a few weeks as a very junior assistant to the great John Z Young. My job was to train octopus to do complex tasks, like recognize shapes dangled in their aquaria or count the grooves in perspex balls. The intelligence of octopus is not widely appreciated, partly because they have little chance to display it when diced in a seafood salad, partly because we tend to think of invertebrates as lower forms of life. But think they do, astonishingly well when in pristine shape. Professor Young used to take out chunks of their brains to figure out which did what. Even when severely damaged, the hologram inside their heads was still readable and they performed valiantly, though more slowly, in all the tests. Sometimes one of these poor creatures would die, and take revenge on us (my other job was to clean the tanks) by producing the most prodigiously bad smell in the world, a stench so revoltingly vile that it would keep us retching for minutes afterwards.
Years later I came back, this time given a little lab to play in, shared with two distinguished foreign scientists. The octopus were gone. We were unpacking our equipment when the Director of the station came to greet us. One of us asked where the store of clean seawater was to be found. We did not know this, but the Stazione had at great expense installed two pipes out to sea to pump it in from the depths. Seawater was now on tap, and with a proud flourish and a smile the director opened one of the taps, which had never been used. For an interminable minute, out hissed and spluttered a mile-long slug of pestilential gas interspersed with random bits of brown gunk, filling the room with a very familiar smell. By the time clear water came, we were all on the terrace retching. There must have been laughter in octopus heaven.
Luca Turin ist Forschungsleiter bei Flexitral Inc.; er lebt in London.
August 1, 2008
"Jasmin et Cigarette" By Luca Turin
"Jasmin et Cigarette" By Luca Turin
Sitting at the bus stop one sunny, quiet morning three weeks ago, I noticed an elderly lady next to me, far too crisply dressed for the shabby neighborhood and smoking a cigarette held very close to the tips of her fingers , her hand arched beyond flat, as in fifties ads. She was wearing a houndstooth jacket and a sweet, powdery, grown-up perfume which could have been the old Dioressence. A breeze suddenly mixed the plume from her cigarette with the fragrance and made me realize how much I missed smoke in public places. Now it is gone, we can see that smoke was the speech of smell, exhaled with every word. It was the olfactory equivalent of a group conversation which you could chose to listen to or treat as noise. It said you were in company, and could speak (or wear perfume) frankly to someone next to you without being overheard. Walk into a pub these days and the clear air feels oddly silent. Any smell of food or fragrance stands naked and precise, like a medical photograph.
Filtering out detail softens the edges of things and focuses our mind on structure, on melody, on the essential. They pipe white noise into open-plan offices so that people do not feel exposed. Painters stand back and blink when looking at a work in progress. The tinkle of glasses in jazz clubs never got in the way of the music. But it was more than that. Some fragrances from that period seem to have been designed with smoke in mind to be mixed at the time of use, one half of some ambient gin and tonic. It was as if the composed smell needed an audience: perfume supplied the music, smoke the crowd noises. This mysterious love affair between speech and music is what sends a shiver down your spine when in a movie the soundtrack fades into a conversation.
It is perhaps no accident that some of the greatest perfumers alive are dedicated smokers. You can see them in the street in the fragrance district of midtown Manhattan, smelling strips in one hand, cigarette in the other, watching a crew dig up the road. I have always believed that smoke helped their art. To be sure, nobody is going to much miss emphysema and lung cancer, and the ritual post-coital cigarette must be on its way out (what replaces it?). But the surest sign of a new era comes from a young perfumer working for Etat Libre d’Orange, Antoine Maisondieu. He has composed a fragrance that addresses the problem: Jasmin et Cigarette.
Sitting at the bus stop one sunny, quiet morning three weeks ago, I noticed an elderly lady next to me, far too crisply dressed for the shabby neighborhood and smoking a cigarette held very close to the tips of her fingers , her hand arched beyond flat, as in fifties ads. She was wearing a houndstooth jacket and a sweet, powdery, grown-up perfume which could have been the old Dioressence. A breeze suddenly mixed the plume from her cigarette with the fragrance and made me realize how much I missed smoke in public places. Now it is gone, we can see that smoke was the speech of smell, exhaled with every word. It was the olfactory equivalent of a group conversation which you could chose to listen to or treat as noise. It said you were in company, and could speak (or wear perfume) frankly to someone next to you without being overheard. Walk into a pub these days and the clear air feels oddly silent. Any smell of food or fragrance stands naked and precise, like a medical photograph.
Filtering out detail softens the edges of things and focuses our mind on structure, on melody, on the essential. They pipe white noise into open-plan offices so that people do not feel exposed. Painters stand back and blink when looking at a work in progress. The tinkle of glasses in jazz clubs never got in the way of the music. But it was more than that. Some fragrances from that period seem to have been designed with smoke in mind to be mixed at the time of use, one half of some ambient gin and tonic. It was as if the composed smell needed an audience: perfume supplied the music, smoke the crowd noises. This mysterious love affair between speech and music is what sends a shiver down your spine when in a movie the soundtrack fades into a conversation.
It is perhaps no accident that some of the greatest perfumers alive are dedicated smokers. You can see them in the street in the fragrance district of midtown Manhattan, smelling strips in one hand, cigarette in the other, watching a crew dig up the road. I have always believed that smoke helped their art. To be sure, nobody is going to much miss emphysema and lung cancer, and the ritual post-coital cigarette must be on its way out (what replaces it?). But the surest sign of a new era comes from a young perfumer working for Etat Libre d’Orange, Antoine Maisondieu. He has composed a fragrance that addresses the problem: Jasmin et Cigarette.
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