The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption by Katy Kelleher

Author:Katy Kelleher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

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Professor Schwarcz’s book offers one reason why we’re drawn to animalic scents, citing studies that suggest people with ovaries could be more sensitive to musk, particularly around ovulation. He cautiously speculates that musk might resemble chemicals produced in humans to attract potential mates.

Over the phone, he is even more wary of speculating about a possible evolutionary explanation for our fragrance preferences. “The sense of smell has been studied thoroughly, with surprisingly little results in terms of what we actually know. It’s such a complicated business,” he said. “We don’t know why musk is more attractive to some people than others. We don’t know why it smells differently when it’s diluted, but we know that it does.” When I asked whether we like musk because we’re programmed to enjoy the smells of bodies, he was quick to turn our talk toward the “issue of pheromones,” which “may not actually even exist at all” in humans, despite our desire to attribute various observed phenomena to the invisible messengers. According to Schwarcz, much of what the general population thinks they know about pheromones only applies to certain nonhuman species. For instance, boar pheromones are well understood, easy to replicate, and used by farmers to increase the farrowing rate amongst their stock. Some of the perfumes that boast “real pheromones,” like Jovan Musk and Paris Hilton’s eponymously named scents, may indeed contain pheromone molecules—but only ones that pigs would find very enticing. However, the marketing copy used to promote supposedly scientifically backed fragrances doesn’t often reveal this inconvenient fact. Instead, we’re led to believe that human pheromones can be bottled and sold, that attraction is quantifiable, that desire follows certain logical lines.

But like Diamond Doris and her learned lust for diamonds, we covet the scents that we’re told to want by magazines and advertisements. When we walk into a department store, we’re often drawn forward not by the smell of a perfume but by its persona. We’re all familiar with this kind of imagery, the pretty pictures of celebrities with glossy lips and perfect hair, photoshopped spokeswomen for femininity and its accoutrements. They help sell us desire, but they also help sanitize and sublimate it. Behind the pseudoscientific marketing talk and the glamorous girls hides the same rutting impulse. Commercial perfumers market scents as pheromone-laden because they know that calling them “secretion-scented” would be a harder sell. They are coyly tiptoeing around the issue, which allows consumers to do the same. Most people don’t want to admit even to themselves that they’re looking for a product that mimics human stink—vaginas, anuses, armpits—but those are the base notes in so many scents, including my beloved “clean” fragrances. If you think that’s disgusting, well, I think that’s also the point. If we can unhitch it from shame, gross can be good.

For perfumer Anne Serrano-McClain, co-owner of MCMC Fragrances in Brooklyn, it is the tension between foul and sweet that elevates a fragrance from consumer product into the realm of art. This is key when it comes to repugnant ingredients, from indolic florals to musky secretions.

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