99% Invisible - Perfume: Articles of Interest #9

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

The world of high end perfume is surprisingly lucrative, considering that scent is often the most ignored of our senses. But one can't judge a scent solely by the brand and shape of the bottle. With the right amount of attention, perfume can be a key to a whole olfactory world. Articles of Interest is a limited-run podcast series about fashion, housed inside the design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible. Launched in 2018 by Avery Trufelman, the show encourages people to rethink the way we look at what we wear and what it says about us.

So what do you want? Oh my god, I'm a slut. I wear a bunch of different stuff. I've never worn the same perfume two days in a row. This is Rachel Sime. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and one of the most genuinely glamorous people I have ever met. So she always smells like some perfume or another.

I love like deor poison. And I use NIE's and I love wearing number five in the highest concentration as the oil. And I like tuberose and I love gardenia and I love it to be like a cloud of that around you. I just love it. I was the opposite of Rachel. I didn't really get perfume.

I would spritz some on at the airport sometimes, but mostly I just found it all smelled perfume-y. I don't think I can smell. On paper, everything just smells like chemicals to me. Yeah, well, it needs a moment to dry down. I wanted to figure out what I was missing. So I asked Rachel to take me perfume shopping at Sephora, hence the annoying pop music you hear in the background.

I like, I love this set. It's so delicious. Oh, it's cut. I'm like, I can't describe it. It's too gross. That's so delicious. Oh, I'm like, I have to describe it. I'm like, oh, it's too gross. That's too gross, but that's sour. And then there's a little ginger on the top. Whatever Rachel was experiencing, I wasn't getting it.

It was like I was trying to fudge my way through a wine tasting by being like, oh yeah, this one has overtones of grape. Too sweet. I guess it just smells chemical eating. It smells like clean,ations, you know? Yeah. I thought perfume was a kind of snake oil,

but basically the only thing separating one perfume from another was the design of the bottle and the name of the brand. I thought perfume was just a way for big fashion labels to make money, which it absolutely is. Like Chanel makes a ton of money from fragrance, Dior, the places where basically people can't always afford the thing, but they can afford the perfume. It's like people's gateway drug to get into the branding. And so I was ready to make a story that would be like,

wake up people, perfume is a ruse. You're getting fleeced for a name and the packaging. You know, I really admire and think a lot about the artistry behind perfumes when they're made, even any of these designer perfumes. This is what Rachel knew that I had yet to find out. Perfume is a key to a whole other dimension that we've all collectively denied and forgotten.

Articles of interest. The show about what we wear. Season 2. People don't realize it's fantasy. It's always this thing that you have to work extra hard to get. Mmm, and that's so good. No one dresses like a king anymore. How do you make money?

That's how we make money, love. There are lots of things that we take for granted that would once have been considered luxuries. If someone forced you to surrender one of your five senses, you'd probably handily give up your sense of smell. I mean, I would. We talk about how foods are umami or spicy or how music can be soothing or energizing or cacophonous, but with scent, we don't really analyze it with a lot of nuance. The question is usually black or white. Do you like the scent

or not? The smells good, the smells bad. We just don't have a lot of tools to analyze smells, linguistically or scientifically. In fact, there is no way to assess the volume of a scent. There are no instruments that can measure odor levels. We have instruments that can measure the chemicals that are in an odor plume, but that doesn't translate into, at least not at the present time, into what the odor experience is for any individual.

Hamill Adolten is a senior scientist at the Monel Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But when I talked to her, she was not in Philly. She was talking to me from a conference room in Chicago. I'm here for a deposition. I do expert witness work from time to time, and this is notercase involving people complaining around bland silly. In legal cases involving smells,

they have to hire professional noses to make very subjective calls. And it's not like Pamela is a superhuman. Generally, people are pretty good at smelling. Much better than we think we are. We can smell at things when there's one or two parts of a fragrance material in a billion parts of air, which is really, really tiny. So we're more sensitive than we believe that dogs may be sensitive to a range of compounds, but humans have much more sensitivity to a much more diverse set of chemicals in the environment. But we don't use scent the way dogs and other animals do.

In part, it's because we're bipedal. Our noses, quite simply, evolved to be farther away from the earth. We're now at four to five to six feet above the ground, so we're smelling different things, right? We're not smelling things as we were when we were loathing around on all fours. Yet still, on occasion, we'll lift our noses to the air and take a sniff. It's just that more often than not, we pay attention to smells that present a threat. Spoiled foods, rot, death, mold, if there's a fire or a gas leak. Farts.

And so we learn that, you know, we want to stay away from those kind of voters. We've come to associate scent with something primal and unpleasant. If you ask, hey, do I smell? The collective assumption is that that's a bad thing. We want to avoid smells and smelling, and this mentality goes back to a number of philosophers in the West, from Plato to Aristotle to Kant, who derided our sense of smell as base and secondary, or really like quenery. Historically, it has been the least respected of our senses. And so a lot of folks just try to ignore it.

But I think as a species, we have discounted that we really can smell a lot of chemicals advancing retrieval concentration. So we have the capacity to smell things in the parts per billions, but we lack the capacity to talk about them. So much of learning to smell comes from learning how to describe smells. So I was at a party.

A woman came in who was hugging everybody and she smelled really good and a number of people told her that she smelled good. And I said, okay, I can tell you that she's wearing this particular brand and it's from this many years ago and the reason that she smells cozy and snug is because it's got a lot of ironones in it, and she smells sort of like auras, which is the aged root of the Florentine iris flower, and it's got a sort of a powdery feeling,

so she smells like a hug. And everyone's looking at me and I was like, I'm not smelling anymore than you are. I just have the words to tell you what the brand is when it came out and what's in it. Miranda Gordon is the vice president of marketing at MAN. MAN is a fragrance company, because the lion's share

of the hundreds and hundreds of designer perfumes that come out each year are made by the same dozen or so companies. MAN has made perfumes for banana public and our money and a ton of sense for really widespread popular brands you definitely know, like, I'm the ****. And when our likes talk about so don't mention those.

For some brands, it's a dirty secret that they contract out their sense to other companies. But I don't think there should be any shame in it. Because sure, most of us have the potential to get really good at smelling, but actually designing a perfume is something entirely different. It's like composing a piece of music

or choreographing a dance. It is an art, and the professionals make it look easy. Let's start simply. Some perfume ingredients can be very straightforward. Like if you're trying to use a citrus scent, that's pretty easy to get. That scent is extracted from the peel of the fruit with cold pressing. At the same rate, we make olive oil. We can make grapefruit oil or lemon oil or lime oil or mandarin oil. But there are a lot of sense that you can't just get. You can't just press the oil of a mango,

or a strawberry, or a pear, or an apple. Like if you pressed an apple peel, you wouldn't get apple oil, you would get apple juice, which is not very fragrant, and you wouldn't want to dab that on yourself. So there are many, many sense that perfumers have to build. Molecule by molecule. In a laboratory.

There are chemicals that have an apple odor to them. Geno Percontino is one of the perfumers at mine. If he wants to make an apple scent, he will gather a bunch of smells together, what some perfumers call notes. Combining and mixing those notes to get an authentic apple smell. And a group of notes makes an accord. An accord is a group of ingredients that's usually less than 10 ingredients, a two, try to emulate a specific thing.

And there's no one set apple accord. less than 10 ingredients, and two try to emulate a specific thing. And there's no one set Apple accord. Every perfumer has their own way to make it. Think of it like, Gino is painting a picture of an apple. It could be realistic, it could be impressionistic, it could be cartoonish, the apple could be slightly fermented, it could be a yellow apple or a green apple, it could be in a tree, it could be in a pie.

Listen to how Gino renders a fig, which is another one of those cents you have to build note by note. Fig is always fun for me because I often work from some of my best coconut, just coconut. So I'm not talking about like peanut collada with pineapple and all that. Just the creamy kind of coconut, if you dial it back

and put more pulp into it, a little more juiciness into it, a little more green with some extra woods, because you want that stemmy element of it, and then you've turned a coconut into a fig. And that's the part that's technically impressive, but making a perfume is not just about rendering a good believable fig.

It's then using that fig in a way that's interesting and new. So, Gino could situate the fig in a scent that's smoky and leathery, or something powdery and floral, or something lush and green, or include an ingredient that I would have never considered. My favorite ingredient is szechuan pepper. Yeah, szechuan pepper. Yeah, szechuan pepper. It's kind of citrusy. It has a citrusy element.

It has an aromatic element. It has a little spicy element. There's a virtuosity in professional perfume. That's the difference between, say, an essential oil from a health food store and a perfume. It's the difference between the pleasure of a single ripe peach and the pleasure of an exquisitely executed risotto. Professional perfume is artistry and intuition and a lot of hard science

because some combinations just don't work on a molecular level. If you don't know what you're doing and you take the smell of black current and the smell of rhubarb and you put it together in a test tube, things are going to interact the molecular level and it's going to smell like the cat pissed on your weed. In Mons Laboratory in Midtown Manhattan, perfumers and technicians were busily mixing drops from

a selection of hundreds and hundreds of notes. The smell of the laboratory was incredible. It wasn't like a perfume counter in a department store. That smells like 50 top 40 radio stations blasting at once. Mons laboratory. Smells like an orchestra of raw possibilities. Composed of both natural and synthetic ingredients.

And without derailing this whole story, let me just say there are some controversies in there. Perfume ingredients are considered trade secrets, so they aren't listed on the bottle, and this opacity has caused some worry, because there are ingredients, natural and synthetic alike, that can trigger allergic reactions, and some animal studies have found fragrance chemicals that are probable carcinogens, or have been linked to liver, kidney, and lung damage. The perfume industry says that all the ingredients

they use are at such low concentration that they aren't dangerous to human health. But there have been calls to set more limits on materials perfumers can use. And sure enough, every now and then, an ingredient gets pulled off the market. I look at it as if they're doing some kind of testing with the ingredients and they're being a little restrictive,

I think there's some value to that, if it's gonna help humanity in some way. It ties my hands a little bit on trying to be creative. Gino is operating within a set of constantly shifting constraints. Instruments are being removed from Man's orchestra all the time. By the different regulatory laws of every country, yes, but also by an ingredients availability.

When a certain scent becomes trendy, it becomes harder to procure. Take Indian sandalwood. It's a delicious natural scent, super popular. There's a drop of Indian sandalwood and pretty much everything on the market. And the challenge with Indian sandalwood is that the trees have to be at least 30 years old before you can harvest them. You can't just go plant more trees and have more oil tomorrow. You've got to wait 30 years. So Indian sandalwood had to be replaced with Australian sandalwood,

which doesn't smell the same, or with synthetic sandalwood, which doesn't smell the same, or with synthetic sandalwood, which doesn't smell the same. So making a new perfume isn't just unbridled creativity. It's limited by a lot of factors. And at the end of the day, the scent has to sell. Mom's brilliant perfumers probably aren't going to make something that smells like fig and szechuan peppers. They manufacture pop music. They're trying to make something interesting within the parameters of mainstream taste,

something you'd buy in a Sephora, or something you'd buy in your grocery store. Because man, and the dozen or so major fragrance companies don't just make perfume. They work on every product that has a smell. Home care, cleaning laundry, personal care. Suzanne McCormick is a head of fragrance for method products. They make soap and detergent and body wash and they work with two of the major fragrance houses. Because I kid you not, it is just the same small handful of companies that are crafting all the sense all around us. And this overlap means that trends in high-end perfume affect your dish soap.

There is a trickle down. It's just like how high-end fashion designers will create a look that eventually ends up at H&M. If a fragrance company develops an accord that sells really well, that scent might eventually end up in your face cream or your laundry detergent. Rose had been considered the older fragrance note, and then many fine fragrance brands were bringing it to life in a modern way. And then as you trickle down to our body wash, we have a penny, rose water. And a while back, there was sea salt and everything. So we did lime and sea salt was one of our fragrances that we did that's continued to do

very well. And so these scent companies are everywhere making you your kitchen and your bathroom smell like citrus and lavender and rose. But this idea of our bodies smelling somewhat interchangeably with our fabric softener and our dishes is relatively recent. We used to have a wildly different concept of what it meant to smell good. I guess I could start with the perfumes that shocked me the most and they were the perfumes of the 20s, 30s and 40s. Barbara Herman is the creative director of

Eris Parfum and the author of the book, Sent and Subversion. I like to describe what I did in this book was sniff my way through the 20th century. What we think people should smell like is completely cultural, and it's changed over time. In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, women were marketed perfumes that were

more funky. Women smelled like tobacco and leather, and, you know, as Jacques Garland said about his perfumes, perfumes should smell like the underside of my mistress. There was this idea that perfume was supposed to smell funky. Perfumes had ingredients like ambergree, which is oxidized whale vomit, and musk, which is deer sex gland secretion. Now these kinds of smells are made synthetically, but in the early 20th century, people wore the real stuff, which sounds off-putting,

but actually, these smells are fascinating. Barbara happened to have some real ambergree in her refrigerator. I mean, it's very very hard sentence to describe. Some people say there's tobacco note, there's obviously a very animalic kind of equal quality to it, but also slightly metallic and chrysanthemum or like hay like slightly sweet. It's more of a feeling than it is a smell for me. It's just like being enveloped in warmth. I loved this smell. I'm like looking at a landscape through a pinhole.

Oh, can I see more of it? Yeah, that's a weird way to describe it. I wish I could stick my head in a box full. Yeah, it's very evocated. Yeah. For all those weird and gross descriptors, amber grease smells incredible. Most sense, especially naturally occurring ones, are way more nuanced and strange than we'd like to believe. There's a sweetness and sweat, a fruiting-ness and blood. I know I sound like a psychopath, but there's a really fuzzy line between delicious and off-putting. If you pay attention to your nose and forget the fact that this may be well-barked.

Because it's sensual and cozy and a lot of, you know, subliminal unconscious effects. I can't put them all into words, but if you've experienced them and if you open to them, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. And it's interesting that people in the 1920s, 30s and 40s were more willing to wear these strong, animalic smells. It's particularly interesting that they were marketed to women.

On the one hand, it's kind of empowering and bold and sensuous, but I also meant these women weren't exactly dousing themselves to go to board meetings. These were cents for the bedroom. And our idea of what femininity should smell like evolved in the 1950s when a lot of bright and powdery cents came out. Very like Doris Day Peppy.

Florals, huge ass, white, florals, screaming. And then, like everything else in culture, scent was subverted by the time you get to the 70s, when there was this natural wave of okmas and patchouli. Then the 1980s were about big bold fragrances, the kind that, as Rachel Sim puts it, could clear an elevator. And then, there was a very important pendulum swing in the 1990s.

A sea change that mainstream sensibilities have still not recovered from. The 90s was generally the clean decade. This is when perfumes like CK1 came out for men and for women. There was this wave of clean smells that were light and fresh and inoffensive. They made you smell like you just showered. Yeah, I mean there's

some great clean perfumes. Like don't get me wrong, I love to rag on them, but I just think that what perfume meant in the past and what it means now is very different. Clean sense took off in a major way. Exceedingly popular, a lot of money in them. And when perfume just became kind of generally pleasant and non-threatening, more and more companies felt comfortable yoking their prize brand name to it. Industrial perfume creation world, which happened

like after the 90s or starting in the 90s, when perfumes just got like, mass produced, celebrity scent thing. And so broadly speaking, we are still stuck there in the fresh and clean era, particularly the United States. Oh, we're Puritans, really? Yeah, to smell was to be sensual or to be erotic or dirty. That's why fresh and clean is such a big deal in this country. Miranda Gordon at Monaghan.

In France, you're sexy if you're a little funky. Here, you've got to be freshly showered and smell like nothing. And in fact, if you do want to smell like nothing at all, that also involves fragrance. Because even when you're buying a product labeled fragrance-free, that is often not true. The product that's labeled fragrance-free in all likelihood remained a customer of ours, and we had to fragrance it in order to cover up the maloters of the functional things in your products. There's probably something in there that's what we call a masking or a masking aroma that's canceling out whatever fishy smell or funky

smell or really smell the ingredients in your face cream might have. Because most things on this earth have a smell. It's just that an industry has developed around avoiding the weird ones. We want to smell fresh and clean and nothing else. And so, yeah, the mainstream perfume market's been stuck in the clean boom for some decades now. But there's been a quiet revolution in the last 15-ish years on the fringes of perfume. An indie scene has blossomed. Okay, so now we're going to smell tomato leather. An indie scene has blossomed. Okay, so now we're going to smell tomato leather.

This is meant to be literally a combination of those two smells. At her San Francisco perfume store, Tiger Lily, Antonio Cole sells sense that are deeply, deeply odd. This fragrance is inspired by the printmaker's studio and by India Inc. Inspired by the god of the afterlife in Egypt. And the smell she imagined would be inside the tunes. This is what smells like when you're waiting for the ferry to take you to Seattle. There's so many more unusual sense in the store.

We've got stuff that smells like campfires and... Ooh. Thousands of independent perfumers have started popping up. Many of them taking artistic risks that a designer brand wouldn't dare attempt. There are hard core boutiques, like Tiger Lily, scattered around the world. And they almost act like oddball record shops

for the underground music nerds who want to sniff the strange stuff. It literally smells like a bat's cave. It's like a strong petricor with where you feel the water on the dirt and the stone in the cave. And then it also represents, it's a day in the life of a fruit bat. So you also get the fallen fruit like rotting banana and you get a

leather that represents the batswing. In this relatively new movement, there are a lot of perfumers who make scent on the side as a passion project. That's the case for the perfumer who made the bat scent. She has a day job. She's also a bat behavioral scientist. Really? And a really orchid farmer. So yes, she teaches at the University of Washington in the behavioral sciences and she specializes in bats. And she does perfume on the side. Yeah. Wow. And wins awards for it. As Antonia and I sniffed around Tiger Lillie's cabinet of curiosities, a customer rushed in breathlessly.

Hi! Hi! how are you doing? I know what you're here for. I'm not. Call them crazy. And Mauricio, I think, has it for you in the back. This customer was looking for a niche scent that had been put on hiatus because... The perfume also is a cyber security expert and it has a new job just got promoted. And so he's so busy, he can't make any more of it so she called today and was like to have any left. People have really strong reactions to perfume. It's an emotional thing and it's not just for that customer at Tiger Lily. We're all wired for it.

You sniff these molecules in. They bind to a receptor. Pamela Dalton from the Monal Chemical Senses Center again. That signal is passing through a portion of the brain called the limbic system which is responsible for emotional responses. So it's that emotional response that becomes so tightly associated with something that we're smelling. When I went to my college reunion, I was struck that my old dorm hallway still smelled the same.

A wafed of bergamot always reminds me of an ex. Eucalyptus brings me back to childhood trips to visit my grandma in San Francisco. We all have this superpower to use scent as a gateway to the past. But in learning to smell and learning to talk about smell, we can experience a vivid present. To stop and smell the roses, sure, but also stop and smell the garbage. Really, in the couch, in the hallway, in the shampoo, and the skin of a mandarin, the sweat and the rain and the plethora and the brick

to smell where you are right now. I think a lot of people are like, I don't like perfume, I have no interest in it. The first time I met Rachel Sim and that's Sephora in Union Square. I was one of those people. And for me, I'm like, wow, I think it's an art form and I'm fasting it by an endlessly and I love what people make and even here I just love exploring all different creations and that's why I'd buy something in a bottle because it's something somebody made. It's like buying art. The second time I saw Rachel, she gave me a little bottle of perfume.

She warned me it was the kind of thing you couldn't get her to Sephora. The bottle was plain, I had never heard of the brand. At first sniff it was cozy, cedar and leather. It was riding on the back of a motorcycle through the woods. Another sniff and it smelled like gasoline and it was actually sickening, it nearly gave me a headache. I abandoned the scent for months. But recently came back and smelled again, and

this time something malted came out of it, almost score-moned. I can't pin it down. It changes with my mood. It changes with my skin. It changes with my day, with my surroundings, and the weather, and the cacophony of smells all around me that I buy and large. Used to ignore. The pocket, the piece of paper, words from yesterday. Words from yesterday. There's a portrait painted on the things we love. Articles of Interest was written and performed by Avery Truffelman, edited by Chris Berube, with additional edits by Joe Rosenberg and Emmett Fitzgerald, scored by Ray Royal, fact-checked

by Tom Colligan with additional fact-checking by Graham Haysha, Mix and Tech Production by Sharifusev with additional mixing by Catherine Ray Mondo. Our opening and closing songs are by Susami. Special thanks to this episode to Master Perfumer Mandy Aftal, Perfume critic Chandler Burr, Perfume bottle designer Chad Levine, Dana Bruno at Man, and especially Vivi Provo at Man. Insight support and edits from the whole 99PIT, including Vivian Le, Sean Rial, Abby Madan, Kurt Colstead, Delaney Hall, and Katie Mingle. And Roman Mars is the fresh and clean scent of this whole series.

There's a portrait of painting of things below. Gender in fragrance is as artificial as social construct as gender in society. Amen Miranda Gordon, VP of Marketing at Mon. Nobody ever said that flowers were only for girls or actually we did say the industry said, but I don't know that the globe agrees that flowers are for girls and woods are for boys. There's no way a given gender is supposed to smell, because we all just kind of smell like our skin and sweat.

The distinction between cologne and perfume is just about the concentration of oil. It's not that cologne is any more masculine than perfume. It's just the way it's marketed. Men and women both used to wear a lot of perfume usually to mask the fact that they didn't bathe. Until one man decided that perfume was for women. But in the course of that, he also would bathe every day,

which was taken at the time, the late 18th century, as a rather ridiculous vanity, and indeed, something that might be even dangerous for your health to wash that often. That's author Ian Kelly. And he says there was this one historic gentleman who decreed that men should smell as plain as possible. In fact, he also thought men should dress as plain as possible, that to be manly was to look boring.

He, yes, happened to be the right person at the right time to be the center of this some shift in fashion. Your next articles of interest are suits. be the center of this some shift in fashion. Your next articles of interest are suits.