The Perfume Lover by Denyse Beaulieu

Author:Denyse Beaulieu
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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‘Skank: derogatory term for a (usually younger) female, implying trashiness or tackiness, lower-class status, poor hygiene, flakiness, and a scrawny, pockmarked sort of ugliness. May also imply promiscuity, but not necessarily’ states the online Urban Dictionary.

But for perfume lovers, ‘skank’ has taken on another meaning. We’re not talking white trash here: we’re talking about what stinks. And we mean it in the nicest possible way.

Cumin: sweat. Jasmine: poop. Civet: ditto. Narcissus: horse dung. Mimosa: used nappies. Costus: dirty hair. Blackcurrant bud: cat pee. Honey: public urinals. Grapefruit: BO with a hint of rotten egg (it contains mercaptan, the sulphurous molecule used to scent the odourless natural gas so that we can detect a leak).

It was my friend March Dodge of the Perfume Posse who gave the word ‘skank’ its new meaning for perfume aficionados in a post about, of all things, some of the most widely revered masterpieces of perfumery, in which she detected something she termed ‘the Guerlain Skank’, ‘a rump-grinding, head-shaking invitation to a booty call, no matter how politely the scent’s been dressed up at the opening.’

No need to call in Dr Jellinek and his theory about erotic materials: perfume lovers, scrambling to catch up on all the classics and on the new, weirder niche stuff, had figured it out all by themselves. The love of skank is one of the most intriguing manifestations of the community’s relational aesthetics dynamics. It isn’t only a convenient term for ‘somethin’ dirty in mah perfume’, as March says: it’s a standard by which perfumes are judged, but also by which perfume lovers position themselves. And it’s probably telling that the notion of skank originated in the hyper-hygienic USA.

In France, everyone’s got at least one beloved family member who sported old-school scents, many of which featured the pungent animalic notes that have been edited out of contemporary commercial products: it is part of the Gallic cultural heritage. But when the American perfume aficion set out to explore the classics, especially in their vintage form, there was some dismay but also a challenge to prove one’s mettle by actually embracing the skank. Perfumers often say there are no stinks, only odours to explore. Perfume lovers take the same attitude, along with the touch of snobbery every hipster cultivates – the general public may turn up their noses at the whiffy stuff, but we know better. In the words of one of the Marquis de Sade’s libertines: ‘We love what no one else loves, and this adds to our pleasure.’

This desire to push back one’s limits in order to experience new forms of pleasure is reminiscent of certain sexual scenarios, but I believe there’s something else at play in the impulse to sublimate our interest in smells into an aesthetic pursuit. Overcoming our aversion to stink through its incorporation into beautiful compositions could be a way of not renouncing our more primal instincts; of drawing the pleasures that Western civilization considers base, and that our education leads us to reject, into the life of the mind – hence the miles of words written on perfume by enthusiasts.

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