It was a few years ago when I was the editor of a women’s pop culture website that I started writing about perfume on my blog, YesterdaysPerfume.com. Trying to be discreet in the middle of an open office, I’d pop open a tiny one-milliliter vial of the decanted perfume du jour and dab it on my wrist with its plastic wand. Then, in a ritual that has become as common as having a meal or reading a book, I’d lift my wrist to my nose, close my eyes, and sniff, like a deranged junky getting her fix.
In that work environment, it would have been appropriate for me to wear perfume in a style that has been popular since the 1990s: the office scent. Usually with citrus notes or oceanic accords that stay close to the skin — notes that project little more than “clean” — an office scent’s raison d’être is to avoid being offensive. It plays well with others. By definition, it is institutional and conformist. CK One, Calvin Klein’s 1994 unisex hit, is the perfect example of an office scent. “CK One,” writes one commenter on a perfume forum, “prolongs that feeling of being washed and clean.” Another fan says, “This is the ONE true fragrance that could just be worn by practically anyone on earth, including newborn babies.”
As I became bored with office life, my rebellion took an invisible — but odoriferous — turn. I didn’t want to smell clean, I didn’t want to blend in, and I certainly didn’t want to smell like a newborn baby. My perfume tastes began to wander over to the wrong side of the tracks, looking for the rude, the louche, and the difficult. I wanted an anti-office scent, a perfume that would flip office culture the bird and throw a smelly Molotov cocktail through the window for good measure.
I found myself drawn to Difficult Smelling Perfumes that subverted the clean perfume trend. Among them were vintage perfumes that took me to distant lands and told me stories about fur-clad, misbehaving women who smoked; “animalic,” erotic perfumes that smelled like unwashed bodies; and perfumes that deliberately overturned trite and outdated gender conventions in perfume.
There were so many first loves in my honeymoon period with perfume.
Take Robert Piguet’s 1944 perfume for women, Bandit. Its composer, Germaine Cellier — former model, reputed lesbian, and legendary iconoclast of scent — was the rare female perfumer, celebrated for her daring overdoses of extreme perfume notes. Her masterpiece Bandit, a bitter green leather perfume for women, was said to have been inspired by the scent of female models changing their undergarments backstage during fashions shows…
Chanel No. 19 (1971) was gentler in its seductions. Rather than slap me with a new and shocking scent, it lulled me into an opiate-like dream state. A Mute Invisible Cinema with its own mise en scène, characters, mood, and even lighting, Chanel No. 19 unfolded before me, projecting visions of a dim, damp forest, with smells of wet earth, vegetal freshness and even the occasional sunbeam intensifying the outlines of inchoate smells…
Christian Dior’s 1972 perfume Diorella, with its disquieting, overripe melon note reminded me — just momentarily — of an overheated dumpster during a New York City summer, with its sweet, sweaty smell of flowers, fruit rinds and meat scraps mingling in their first, fetid blush of decay…
Not all of the subversive scents that took me to the Wild Side were vintage. Some were contemporary perfumes whose composers pushed their creations into more daring olfactory and cultural directions than the prevailing cult of clean perfumes. Serge Lutens’ Muscs Koublai Khan (1998), composed by Christopher Sheldrake, emerged repeatedly in online perfume forums as the bad boy of niche perfumes, gossiped about like a dude with a bad reputation…The dirty animal to CK One’s freshly washed baby, Muscs Koublai Khan smelled like wet fur, unwashed hair and bodies, combined with the faintest, softest hint of something sweet and powdery, like wild honey and pollen…This elegant brute of a perfume, like a pungent bohunk from a Harlequin Romance novel, had truly swept me off my feet. Its atavistic embrace of animal notes (albeit in synthetic form) hearkened back to vintage perfume styles and even to the 19th century Dandy’s love of musk, civet and ambergris…
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