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subscribe to style file blog via RSSscents and sensibility
January 23, 2008 12:05 pm
Chandler Burr’s day job sounds too precious to exist: He’s the scent critic for The New York Times. But beneath the effete-sounding title beats the heart of a true journalist (i.e., he’s not lacking on strong opinions). His new book, “The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York” (Henry Holt), follows the creation of two fragrances—Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely and Hermès’ Un Jardin sur le Nil—and the myriad of pubic relations meetings, sales strategy sessions, and endlessly honed formulae that go along with their launches. To read it is to approach the perfume counter with a radically altered consciousness—it’s the “Origin of the Species” for fragrance. Burr talked to us about French marketing, talking Labradors, and what men should really smell like.
Let’s start with something basic. What do you look for in a perfume?
There’s a checklist answer and a totally subjective answer. The checklist is: something stable on skin that diffuses nicely and lasts more than two hours. The subjective answer is: something that either blows me away like a Molotov cocktail at close range (most recently Rossy de Palma’s Eau de Protection) or just melts me to helplessness with its pure beauty (Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Fragile) or delights me (Missoni by Missoni) or seduces me like a shot of opium in an artery (Ambre Narguilé by Hermès).
That’s a very personal response, which makes perfect sense, because perfume is an intensely personal thing. But judging by your book, what the perfume industry really comes down to is money. What kind of effect has that had on the kinds of perfumes that make it to the market now?
If you talk to people in the industry you hear a huge amount of pessimism. The example everyone uses is Angel, which is a billion-dollar perfume today, and Angel completely failed the first several years—plural!—it was on the market. Only at the insistence of the people at Parfums Thierry Mugler did the thing stay on the market, find an audience, then build. The problem is that today the competition is just so insanely intense; there are so many launches—600 a year—and the return on investment has become so important that a scent basically has to be an instant hit.
It sounds similar to fashion, actually. You need an instant It bag to make a splash. But to get back to fragrances, does this mean we’re getting perfumes that smell of pessimism?
No. Well, yes. Overtly, no—the “creatives” are still demanding that their perfumers churn out perfumes that smell of cotton candy and jeweled necklaces and shimmering midnight seas and all the other fun kitsch poetry that goes into mass marketing so much perfume. But get a perfumer to speak to you honestly, and behind the pink facades they are (not always by any means but often enough) grimly conforming to mandated formulaic scent accords, which is a pretty good definition of the smell of pessimism.
Perfumers sound like fairly odd people—my words, not yours. But you do say at one point that Freud would have a field day with them.
Their sense of smell is so astonishingly developed that they are, in a real sense, profoundly different from the rest of us. I believe I wrote, “Spending time with them is like spending time with talking Labradors.” I love it—you go to lunch, and they explain to you the molecular structure of the scent in the moist towelette at the sushi place. They are intensely competitive, put under immense pressure to perform, constantly set against each other with every single perfume brief from Lauder or Dior, constantly auditioning their work. It’s a hell of a job.
Creating perfume does seem like a kind of magic. Which I guess is part of the myth that perfume companies want to preserve.
Ah, but the perfume companies are dead wrong—completely obtuse—in the way they go about preserving the magic, and the effect of the myths they try to create is the opposite of what they want: Instead of enchanting and attracting customers, the smoke screens irritate, repel, and bore. French marketing—”I’ll create a myth for you; you’ll swallow it obediently”—is Darwinianly maladapted to the twenty-first century and destined to become extinct. Twenty-first-century magic and myth is about understanding the machine’s insides, having access to the process, and being convinced as a client—not through obscurantism but through contemporary transparency.
One last question: Why do so many men’s fragrances smell so bad?
Because the tradition is to drain everything that is beautiful and innovative and delicate and lovely and interesting out of women’s perfumes, take the shit that’s left on the bottom, scrape it up, and sell it to men. It’s vile—and it makes an astounding amount of money because most (not all) male consumers have been successfully conditioned to believe that smelling like laundry detergent, charred spices, or cheap lemonade is “masculine.” Any man with two atoms of sense knows that he has to find a great feminine and wear it. Kelly Caleche from Hermès is essentially the perfect masculine. Every guy should try it.
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