I work in the wholesale perfume district, but until recently I’d never been in one of the shops that line its blocks, their windows full of yellowing gift boxes and magnum-size display bottles of scent. Some of the stores clearly traffic in forgeries; perfumes are often ridiculously named, but the fakes still manage to stand out because they’re called things like “OK One,” “Paul Sport,” and “Bossy for Men.” Others sell the real deal, but not to casual one-bottle buyers, or so I’d always assumed. Recently, I met a fellow smell enthusiast for lunch near my office and her presence emboldened me. We ended up going into two of the shops.
In the first, a put-upon man reluctantly helped us smell testers of Wolverine, SpongeBob, and Superman-branded scents—ostensibly for children, though they all smelled like evil aftershave. In the second, the salesman was more obliging, so eager for us to smell Femme Rochas that he slit open the plastic overwrap on a new box. I was curious about it, because I’d just read an enticing description of it in Barbara Herman’s recent book, “Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume.”
Herman is the author of a blog called Yesterday’s Perfume, one of many online hubs where the scent-obsessed gather to swap vials and try to capture the ephemeral, primal experience of scent in words. Perfume criticism, especially online, is a burgeoning field. There’s something about the very personal experience of smelling that makes pinning it down with words irresistible, and the online economy has made it easier than ever for people to sample esoteric fragrances in order to write about them. “Scent and Subversion” collects Herman’s reviews, but its genius lies in putting them in chronological order based on when each perfume was first produced. This allows Herman to develop a theory of perfume’s evolution in the course of the past century: review by review, evidence piles up. The story is about evolving gender roles and societal norms, from the smoky, sharp, groundbreaking fragrances of the twenties all the way to the watery, unisex “office smells” of the nineties, and beyond. But it’s not as simple as the story of feminine scents turning more masculine (Charlie!) then turning unisex (L’Eau d’Issey). According to Herman, when you pay attention to the narrative of how perfume actually smells, rather than how it is marketed, the story becomes delightfully non-linear.
A chief example of this complexity is in Herman’s chapter on the nineteen-forties, when Femme was born. Herman gives the impression that this was a particularly confusing time to try to figure out how to smell. For the first half of the decade, women had to go to work in factories to support the war effort, and, when men came back, women were supposed to happily return to their kitchens. It was a moment when fashion enforced a cartoonish, almost camp femininity: think crinolined, wasp-waisted dresses. But, according to Herman, women’s perfume belied the New Look, or at least underscored its artificiality. She points to the “butch, leather-clad masculinity” of Bandit and the “aggressive, almost-drag femininity” of Fracas to demonstrate that women now at least knew that they were capable of playing multiple roles.
The structure of Herman’s book poses an implicit challenge to the ideological underpinnings of another recent collection of perfume reviews, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s “Perfumes: The A-Z Guide.” Rather than focus on the sociopolitical climate that surrounded a perfume’s initial emergence onto the market, that book traffics in something closer to auteur theory, explaining that readers should think of perfumes as compositions, tracing the stories of the evolving personal aesthetics of different perfumers who are guided by different schools of influence. This is fascinating, too, and the two theories aren’t incompatible; it helps me to understand what attracts me to Femme to know that it’s a late-period creation of the master French perfumer Edmond Roudnitska, who also created Diorella, Eau Sauvage, and Eau d’Hermès. Herman calls Roudnitska a master of “funk”—to her, his slightly off notes of decay are what make his scents classics, because “these ripe smells connote death as much as they do life, and…it is the mortality of these bright and alive things that makes them beautiful.” Once you start looking for these kinds of through lines in perfumers’ work, you find them everywhere.
But “Perfumes” also has one key element that “Scent and Subversion” could use a stronger dose of: Internet-y, brash humor, especially in its pans. (CK 1 In2 U is memorably reviewed thus in “The Guide”: “IM IN UR BOTTLE BORIN UR GF.”) Herman can be funny, but mostly she is reverent. Her reviews tend to blur together in a smudge of laudatory adjectives, as perfumes blur into a general impression of perfumeyness after you’ve smelled too many of them. Still, there are brilliantly evocative turns of phrase: Fracas is as “alive as a carnivorous plant.”
For a self-described “vintage”-perfume obsessive, Herman is surprisingly optimistic about the future of scent. Despite regulations that threaten to strip the newly formulated versions of the historic smells she loves of the chemicals that make them work, she describes the past few years as seminal for perfume; seminal and, well, semen-scented. Etat Libre d’Orange’s famous 2006 scent Sécrétions Magnifiques, which is meant to evoke the smell of sex just before its culmination, gets a whole chapter to itself. Herman says that Sécrétions “shifts us from the twentieth-century perfume ethos of heterosexual romance and gender conformity to a no-limits queer space.” I like no-limits queer spaces as much as the next person, but I would still prefer (call me crazy) not to smell like a mixture of blood, milk, and cum. À chacun son goût.
The thing about “difficult” perfumes like Sécrétions, Poison, Angel, Bandit, and Kouros is that they can be difficult to be around. To a person who works in an office, the nineties vogue for quiet, nonviolent scents can seem less like a reaction against eighties maximalism than like a natural evolution of an untamed art form into something that we can all live with. When I came back into the office that day, with Femme on my wrist, I apologized to the woman who works at the next desk over. Herman calls the 1944 iteration of this classic fragrance a “classic fruit chypre that smells like softness” and says that the cumin in the current version makes Femme more “wearable and modern.” But I found the cumin body-odorish in a disquieting way when paired with that cuddly, musky softness; the heart of modern Femme is like getting into a ripe-smelling cab, looking into the rearview mirror, and discovering that the driver is Marilyn Monroe.
As it faded to a caramel-tobacco drydown, though, I sniffed my wrist again, then again. And then I went online and spent a couple of bucks on a one-millilitre decant of vintage Femme, from a Web site dedicated to fumeheads like Herman and me.
Emily Gould is the co-owner of emilybooks.com and the author of a memoir, “And the Heart Says Forever.” Her début novel, “Friendship,” will be published in July.
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Above: Thalia Barbarova in 1925. Photograph by Sasha/Stringer/Getty.
