Why I Hate Celebrity Fragrances on a Conceptual Level (c/w a short review of I Am King by Sean John).

Perfume counters in department stores are chaotic places come Christmas. Perfume is, perhaps better than anything else, adept at distilling an essence, and increasing its expanse and presence on demand. For this reason it is, in itself, held in small vials, which allow shop-keepers to place a lot together in a relatively small area (for the amount and range of products concerned). So, come Christmas, these aisles which are usually just right a fit for you and a few others, happy to sniff around, become cramped, frenzied affairs, with all manner of hands clamoring around and grabbing and spraying noxious odouers onto dripping strips of paper.

It was in this setting a few weeks ago that I spent some time going through and sampling whatever was in front of me – less intent on making a purchasing selection (I am currently and inarguably poor) and more intent on trying to grasp what each perfumer was trying to do with their perfumes, how they went about trying to do it, and to what extent they were successful. My perfumery knowledge is still largely amateur, but I thought it an interesting and engaging activity to do while I killed time before I went off to buy some shoes.

Some perfumes were clearer than others. Dirty English was obvious – it’s grimy, alcoholic smell communicated a kind of audacious disregard for cleanliness only seen amongst the vilest and most attractive of 60’s rockers. It was very soon unpalatable, my nose moving into sneezing fits to be rid of it. I tried the new scent my Issey Miyake, which was called A Scent By Issey Miyake, and encased in a kind of iconic reference to a perfume bottle, and found it a kind of excited, fresh, green scent which danced around a lot and then proceeded to go absolutely no where. But perhaps the scent itself was so post-modern that I didn’t understand its cleverness. I moved on. And then I hit upon this:



I have seen advertisements for Sean John’s “I Am King” pop up unhelpfully on my browser whilst attempting to read something else, and it featured the man dressed in a tuxedo, riding a jet ski, and some seemingly non-sequiter shots of some bronze shaded women lilting and wilting about in bikinis. Much like Sean John/P.Diddy/Puff Daddy’s entire career, the spot was tongue in cheek enough to shield him from a certain degree of scorn, but not tongue in cheek enough to actually be remotely interesting. It didn’t help that he used the most trite of all imagery – the James Bond scenario: the “meat-lovers pizza” of male fantasy, so utterly bereft of imagination or intrigue and catering for the largest, shallowest of puddles.

If you check the notes list on basenotes.com (which is very handy for these things), I Am King reveals a list which includes the following: French Berry, Mediterranean Water, Lemon Crème, Key Lime Pie. Let’s keep those four ingredients in mind, and for the sake of comparison, lets look at what basenotes.com lists as some of the notes of the previously reviewed Invasion Barbare by MDCI: Lavender, White Thyme, Bergamot, Violet Leaves.

So:

French Berry, Mediterranean Water, Lemon Crème, Key Lime Pie.

against

Lavender, White Thyme, Bergamot, Violet Leaves.

Can you see the difference? One of these fragrances is bullshitting you. Bullshit is very common in all forms of design, fragrance design not excluded, because it essentially very easy to do. To appreciate the aesthetic worth of anything designed you must be willing to take a certain leap of faith that the designer is affecting you as they intended to. Because these effects very easily slip below our conscious radar, which tries to justify to ourselves certain things for certain reasons (‘Of course this chair is a classic of modernism, I paid $4,000 for it’ the most usual excuse), bullshitting is so simple to get away with. Believe me, as a former A+ design student, I know this. But the designers of I Am King give themselves away with this completely ridiculous notes list. Key Lime Pie? Seriously? As a top note, it hits you as soon as you spray it on – this disgustingly false lime accord which smells almost like a stupidly sweet insect repellent. But more to the point – why? How on earth does Key Lime Pie work with anything else there? My housemate made a good point – it was like they called up Sean John and asked him what he wanted for his new fragrance. Looking around at the meal in front of him, he simply listed some of his favourite foods. This is a fragrance not only lost, but lost and panicking, terrified, with out a clue of where to go or what to do.

It also reveals my problem with celebrity fragrances. Because were this fragrance in any other bottle in any other name, nobody would buy it. But because it is attached to the success of Sean John and the stupidly large advertising campaign to go with it (also, I assume, pressure on retailers to stock it – as there was a full shelf with nothing but I Am King alone, whereas most fragrances stood on 1/8th of one), people will buy it. And within a capitalist society, where monetary success is the central motivation of companies, it will become a successful fragrance.

The problem is not that it has a celebrity attached to it and it is successful, nor am I suggesting that all celebrity fragrances are terrible - my problem is that they become successful for reasons other than the fragrance in itself. And for a fragrance – something that should be purely aesthetic and purely personal, this becomes something of a minor tragedy (and a major tragedy for the perfume industry), as it then allows people to make shitty, sub-standard products and get away with it because they have the right label, the right face, and throw around enough money. This happens enough, and soon the mainstream avenue is littered with this formula, as the motivation of economic success, now achievable without any kind of artistic success, is not enough to guarantee a product of any real discernible value.

This is how mediocrity reigns supreme: people let it. You should never buy a fragrance for anything but the way it smells. Otherwise you have to ask yourself: why am I really buying this? How empty is my life that I am forgoing what my senses say in favour of what the label says? You are essentially selling your sense of smell short.

Scent is the most personal of our sensual interaction with the world, and the least cerebral. To attach it to the entirely cerebral social construct of celebrity is to completely miss the point of a fragrance, and completely miss out on what makes them so wonderful: the lack of thought, the pure, unadulterated enjoyment.

Angry Smells

I have a theory, not based on any tests or even any kind of evidence or observation, which states that if you smell like something, you don’t impose yourself to be that something.

If we take as given that a certain percentage of our emotions and actions are through compensation (which is certainly not a given, but just for now…), then this perhaps makes a tiny amount of sense – if, through smell, we have convinced ourselves we are something, then we lose that compensatory motivation to be that. If we smell very very sexy and alluring then our attempts to convince the world that we are, in fact, very very sexy and alluring through other means – via what we say or how we act – are perhaps lessened. Again, this is entirely a theory pulled out of thin air and not based on anything at all apart from a mild amount of experience, and I make no pre-tense about actually being correct about this (or anything). I do believe that with the world of smells though it is worth a thought – I know that when I have worn very sexy fragrances like Nasomatto’s Duro my propensity to communicate sexiness is unconsciously stifled. This, more than anything else, is perhaps the greatest that can be said for a perfume increasing one’s confidence – all it works in is alleviating insecurity through a kind of emotional self-manipulation.

Or the entirely opposite thing happens: if you wear something that you utterly do not believe yourself to be, then all the smell informs you is of the chasm between who you are and who the smell is suggesting you are. That is why Jubilation XXV does not make me feel more secure about my financial status, it simply feels like I am too poor to pull it off successfully. Chanel no.5 does not make me feel more feminine, it informs me how unfeminine I am by comparison. The effect of this though isn’t so much an increase of insecurity though, rather, since smell is more visceral and operates from the gut (not literally, of course), it rejects outright these contradictory smells. Jubilation XXV makes me feel poor, but not insecure about not having much money – I viscerally reject it, and accept my paltry lot. Similiarly Chanel no.5 does not make me aspire to be more feminine to match it, rather it recognizes the length of this chasm and pedals back accordingly.

So, to summarise: if you wear a fragrance which communicates something you both aspire to and are able to display, then the experience of wearing it will reduce your insecure motivation to display said thing. However if you wear a fragrance which communicates something which you have no self-belief in achieving, or else doesn’t communicate anything of either your aspirations or realities, then you reject this communication and similarly don’t display said thing.

What happens then if a fragrance is communicating something you don’t aspire to, but at the same time can’t remotely deny as being part of you? What if a fragrance communicates something which, in fact, you don’t like about your personality? Say a fragrance that made you smell greedy, or shallow, or deceitful. What happens then, how do the rest of your actions compensate?

*

Today I tried on two different fragrances from two different houses which, to me, smelt angry. One, Vetivier 46 by Le Labo, is a kind of charged, fiery anger. The other, Sandal De Mysore by Serge Lutens, is a brooding, manly anger. But they both carry in them something which communicates fury.

To start wirh Vetivier 46: vetivier absolute, when smelled un-diluted, is one of the most rough and jarring of all perfume ingrdients: it smells of burnt coffee and dirt, and you wonder how it ever became such a perfumery mainstay. When controlled however, and its best attributes highlighted, it becomes one of the most beautiful of notes. Similar to how patchouli can transform from being a dirty, hippy smell into a sweet, elegant note, vetiver transforms from this ugly earth demon to this pinnacle of class and sophistication. Vetivier 46 works so well however because of its success in leaving some of this demon in. This has a cave-dwelling, indolent, extravagantly earthy smell – the gaiac wood and vetiver lend the masculine beauty, while the black pepper and patchouli allows it to crackle off. This is where it becomes angry – it is so stubborn and uncompromising in itself and those crackles – the points of the scent which splinter but do not fizz like citruses (though it has bergamot in it, which I imagines adds to this effect) – hint at an emotional fragility (which contrasts with the calm vanilla on the base) and the cloves lends the fieriness. And that’s what it smells like really: fire. Disarmingly beautiful fire – not just the smoke or incense of so many other scents, but proper, burning fire.

Sandal De Mysore is an entirely different equation, but really just as beautiful. It starts as this almost funky, sweet-sweaty, spicy smell, but soon (but not too soon, it flashes its ugliness around a good deal first) smoothes into an unapologetic calm of Mysore sandalwood. But it is unerring. With that calmness, that ugliness is still there – the body odour, and the all too edible smell. It’s as if it forces itself into this calm beauty in spite of itself. And this is why it is so marvellous: in using its notes so delicately, it communicates a kind of restraint. This is where its anger appears: it seems so acceptable, now so well meaning, but you just saw it as this ugly, putrid beast. You know it’s lying now as it sits still, and you wait for it to break, to snap.

It doesn’t, it just sits and occasionally reminds you with a whiff of something animal, which is then all the more alarming.

*

My un-scientific, un-proven (un-provable) theory about smell and insecurity would suggest this: if our fragrance carries with it an attribute that we deem negative perhaps the wearing of it would lessen the uncontrollable, invisible effects and motivations of that attribute. Especially because it is beautiful, it gives us a chance to own it, to claim it as our own and then gain some control over it, rendering it more articulate, and at the same time, less dangerous. If we wear an angry fragrance the emotional experience is not one of making ourselves angrier, but rather that of recognising and bringing to the surface such things so they need never surprise us, and reach out from the dark corners like clawing hands.

Of course, as always I am quite willing to be completely wrong, but I hope I am right. It is a nice thing to believe.



(image on top, as well as samples, from luckyscent.com - who do a wonderful job and I am very glad of the existence of)

L'Eau D'Issey pour Homme, or, the problem with popularity

L'Eau D'Issey pour Homme was the last bottle of perfume I bought before I started becoming interested in perfume. This gives hint as to what it really is: the perfume for men who don't think to much about perfume. It is fresh, zesty, and with its strange combination of yuzu and sandalwood, quite unique.

My reason's for buying a bottle though had nothing to do with the smell. In fact, even when purchasing it I still hadn't warmed to the smell - it was too fresh and too zesty, like it was beckoning on insecurely for humid afternoon. My reasons for buying a bottle then, were very very stupid: it was because of the brand. At the time I was really into the work of a designer by the name of Tokujin Yoshioka. I loved his amazing chairs which communicated a real playful elegance and wit, but at the same time maintained a kind odd humility: it was as if the chairs themselves didn't know their own genius (this was, I should note, before I found and sat on one, and found it to possess a terrible texture and a generally over-bearing presence in real life). But Yoshioka was the young fledgling designer working under Miyake's wing, and I got into Miyake's curatorial design work for that. His watches collection in particular is very fun (though bounces between the stupid and the beautiful, depending on the watch). Feeling I trusted Miyake's judgment, I gambled on the bet that I would eventually warm to his perfume.

I did for a while. I really liked the fact that it didn't smell like I had imagined male fragrances to smell, but at the same time still smelt masculine. There was a real Japanese masculinity to it, a type of iki-masculinity - kind of dandy-ish but androgynous rather than feminine. The handsome young Japanese men you see on variety shows, extroverted and elfin and adored by women. And this last point is important.

Wear Issey Miyake and you will probably hear in female whispers around you "Someone's wearing Issey...". They then may ask you if it's you. You say "Yes.". They say:
"I love Issey Miyake, I had an ex who wore it..."
Or maybe it's their current partner. Mention the fact that you wear L'Eau D'Issey pour Homme and, far more so than any other fragrance, women will gush over both how much they adore it, and how they probably have had someone in their life who also wears it (without excaggerating, if the 5 women I've conversed with about Issey Miyake, all have had more or less this reply). Which tells you two things:
1. Women love Issey Miyake.
2. Probably because of this, men over-wear Issey Miyake.

I had no idea of Issey Miyake's reputation for either of these points when I bought it - had I known I probably wouldn't have laid down the cash. But it proved a very interesting investment as the experience of wearing the fragrance taught me something very important about fragrance: It does not pay to be popular.

This is why: Issey Miyake will never be You. Or they will be You, but not only You. If you were to walk down the street wearing Issey and passed someone who got a whiff - they would smell it, and more so than any other perfume, think of someone else - not You. Smell and memory tends to work on a first come, first served basis - the first person who wore lots of Issey will then claim the smell, and you may in fact become this person for one or two people - but for the vast majority you won't be: you will be their ex who once called them fat then locked himself in the bathroom for 2 hours for reasons they're still unaware of, you will be their brother that once sat on their bed crying after his lies about sleeping with Laura Bradley caught up with him in the most painful way, you will be their boyfriend that loves going into work everyday solely for the reason that he can stand and stare at the bikini-girl posters from Zoo magazine plastered on the storeroom wall. But you won't be You.

In fact it is so over-used it becomes a kind of fog. I smelt it on three men tonight just walking through the store. Eventually that Yuzu-Sandalwood combination becomes this general feeling of man: the zesty smell really blends badly with BO as well, so it generates a kind of lazy, "Was working, came home and stunk, sprayed something on over it to hide it", Lynx-effect male mentality. It becomes a man, undoubtedly, but a nameless, faceless man, existing somewhere in the general area of society. And maybe this works for you - maybe all you want in a fragrance is something that lets people know you are a man - any man. But you should want more, because without this fog, a good fragrance communicates so much more. Absinthe by Nasomatto, for example, communicates an earthy yet temperamental genius - a faulty person for sure, but someone whose pure world view is so profound you couldn't really doubt them. Antico Caruso by Profumum is a tremendously succesful man who has never forgotten his roots - he still has Sunday dinner with his family each week, and doesn't show off his wealth, as he is completely comfortable with his position in life. L'homme Sage by Divine speaks of such tremendous sensitivity, such awareness of the senses, that there is no way they can be anything less than a divine lover.

In the face of so many other fragrances, why settle for something that just says "man"? A nameless group, sweaty shirts and gelled hair, annoying you because they took their drinks onto the dance floor. You deserve better.

Invasion Barbare by MDCI

In other reviews I've read that this fragrance ultra-masculine, but a kind of rugged, muscular, barbarian-like (in a Schwarzenegger sense) masculine, which evokes bronzed bodies, animal hide and unrealistic muscles. But I feel these reviews are largely missing the point of Invasion Barbare - that is, it still smells like a torrid, sword-wielding fight, but one done through a certain kind of aesthetic, largely contrary to the aforementioned image.

To me, Invasion Barbare, with its musk/vanilla/leather base and lavender/grapefruit tops, smells of exquisite flesh. It is fresh, clean and sun-soaked flesh. It is lavishly smooth flesh with all the spicy notes (ginger, cardamom) playing finely nuanced supporting roles.

Because it is really an imagined, idealized flesh, it has the effect of being something quite familiar-yet-strange. It becomes the concept of flesh rather than anyone's actual flesh, but in doing so, highlights the nature of flesh to a degree that disembodies it. It is too beautiful a flesh to be actually attached to any living thing, it is rather flesh which is just kind of floating there in mid-air. Much like Luca Turin talks about fruit scents evoking giant imagined fruits, this fragrance evokes a giant hunk of flesh. Now, a giant piece of fruit is all very well and good - this in itself is desirable and playful. But a giant hunk of flesh? No matter how beautiful, there is something violent about it. And no doubt, this is a violent fragrance.

The name is the first give away: Barbarian Invasion. More than enough sliced, disembodied flesh in those two words. Then, there is the slightly carrion-like smell that just juts under everything else - it is not sickly though, but utterly entrancing. Like a slight fecal smell can make a floral scent narcotic, the slight smell of death here makes this all the more desirable. It ends up then being not-unlike a Japanese envisioning of a beautiful, aesthetic death, with its puzzlingly alluring dismemberment and spurts of blood on rainbow arcs. It is truly the most romantic, divine death imaginable.

There is a particular way it blends with your sweat as well that is very clever, but I'll talk about that another day (when I talk about M.Micallef's Gaiac, another tremendous masculine scent). This is really one of the best fragrances I've ever smelt.

Jubilation XXV by Amouage

I've often held fantasies of being fantastically wealthy. These are guilty fantasies because I like to downplay the importance of money as much as possible - deep down I do believe that materialism obstructs more happiness than it creates. But still the less dogmatic, less mature side of me occasionally envisions a future of sizable, if not infinite, wealth.

Jubilation XXV could be said to represent such a fantasy. It is the fragrance equivalent of Uncle Scrooge's giant vat of gold coin's from Duck Tales. It is simply full of opulent ingredients: a very striking frankincense, gaiacwood, ambergris, oud, musk - and spices like cinnamon and clove, ad sweet smelling honey and orange and rose - it is basically a lot of perfume in one single perfume. It dries down to a very comfortable, dark, rich scent. But before this it fizzes. Fizzes very strangely, right in the back of your nose. Like when you take the first sip of freshly poured champagne. After that it sparkles. Like gold. I assume this is what they were trying to evoke - images of lavish, high-society parties with all the trimmings of a financially over-zealous existence.

Which is essentially the problem with the fragrance: it's trying to smell rich. It's trying to evoke wealth, and the moment you detect the attempt at something is the moment you doubt its sincerity. Which is odd. Because it is rich and it is opulent and it is stupidly expensive ($245 US for 50ml), but by giving away that hint of effort to appear this way it ends up undermining it all. Because a truly wealthy fragrance would never go out of its way to appear wealthy - much like an accomplished fighter doesn't start fights in front of kebab shops - knowing they have nothing to prove, they forgo their insecurity.

As beautiful and as well crafted as it is, I think it's a rather idiotic fragrance to actually wear, as it suggests immediately: this is who I want to be. Of course, all perfume does this to an extent, but usually its ideals are connected to character or personality or sexual archetype - we want to smell professional or sexually mysterious or playful or such. By smelling like Jubilation XXV you admit to a kind of superficiality in which your ideals don't even have personality traits, just wealth. They are merely wealthy mannequins, their arms positioned they best they can to sip, but the champagne just cascading over their plastic lips and staining the expensive fabric which covers their nipple-less chests.