Scentzilla!

“You know, Bijou, I would love you more if you did not bathe so often. I love the smell of your body, but it is faint. It vanishes with so much washing. […] I like the strong female smell. Please wash a little less.”

~ the Basque to his lover Bijou in the story The Basque and Bijou (from Anais Nin’s collection of stories, Delta of Venus.)

It’s a peculiar habit of modern life that we wash away all our natural smells only to slap on new ones. Weirder still is the popularity of “clean” scents aimed to further obfuscate the aroma of actual cleansed skin. The social bias against the unwashed masses has resulted in a cultural predilection to remove the stink of humanity from the human body.

We pluck and remove hair that nature put there. We obsessively freshen breath when our mouths exist in a golden age of dentistry that prescribes frequent brushing anyhow. We wash inside orifices which by design already evacuate themselves. We paint new faces on old ones - intending to merely enhance what we already like, but sometimes it looks more like trying to subvert what we were born with.

We were born to decay; decay has a stink; we are made to stink.¹

However, one can’t discredit the benefits of hygiene for humanity. Nor can one exist in a creative vacuum where, out of all the senses, smell alone remains artistically unexplored. Perhaps the best perfumes, like the best applications of makeup or fashion, serve to highlight what we like best about the natural through cunning use of utter artifice.

Caron’s Yatagan revels in the feral innocence of the Nature Child. Yatagan is not an attempt to imitate the smell of traipsing through the forest without access to indoor plumbing and hot showers, it is an impression of it. Just as in comedy, it is impression rather than imitation that startles and delights us. Impressions investigate minutiae, amplifying details that don’t ordinarily stand out. Imitations, on the other hand, leave us unsatisfied, appearing like wan ghosts of diluted reality with nothing novel to say.

Yatagan shows off dirty pine needles littering the forest floor in a sticky relief map of hidden smells. The spicy little voices of herbs (lavender, fennel, basil) and grass strain under the shade of bellicose trees, singing with a more delicate tenor than the woody baritone shadows they grow in. Its armpit funk from patchouli accompanies a dark whiff off Pan’s sun-leathered skin, and brings us back to the realization that we are all Nature’s Children wandering through the world, whether our forests are wooded or urban.

We cannot deny nature. We cannot invent it. We can, however, share impressions of it. The delight found in Yatagan’s impression lies in a rejection of the hypervigilant scrubbing away of nature, while paradoxically being a product of the basic hygiene ritual.

If you’re wearing perfume, you’re not feral. But you can remind yourself and the rest the world you could be.

As one version of a highly apocryphal story goes, Dr. Samuel Johnson had been traveling for weeks without access to a bath. As he waited on a rail platform for his train to arrive, a fellow passenger complained about his disheveled state with an admonishment that he smelled. The annoyed Dr. Johnson responded, “No, madam. You smell, I stink.”

¹Maybe this is why fragrances geared towards a youth demographic always smell so insipidly fresh and fruity, while heavier animalic ones are frequently derided as “old lady perfumes.” Perhaps fragrance characteristics represent an evolving comfort level (or lack thereof) with aging and our own organic rot, rather than being strictly a matter of taste. Or perhaps perfume as an artistic manifestation of the fear of dying is such an imaginative stretch that it’s just too silly an idea to entertain. Either way, it’s a tangent that’s too long for a little ol’ footnote to contain, so I’ll leave it there.

I have a complicated relationship with Nocturnes. It took me a while to figure out that while I admire it, I can’t particularly carry it off. According to Basenotes, it was created by Gerard Lefort for Caron in 1981.

Nocturnes smells as if the notes were blended together in a giant lacquered box before finding a home in a bottle. Its quality of being hidden away in a dark place, only lit by the stray reflections bouncing of the lacquer, gives the fragrance a somber feel. Rose and orange notes glance off the shades of Nocturnes’ cold wood and warm musk.

I don’t notice some of the other notes individually, such as neroli, ylang, tuberose, jasmine. They mix and swirl around one another without drawing attention to themselves. Despite all those white florals, Nocturnes doesn’t wear as light on me. It is not weighty or bogged down by its heavier elements, but the fragrance is most certainly characterized by moving shadows. Through the background of this fragrance I sense something rather amber-y glowing, lain within the wood like a strip of marquetry.

Nocturnes is a beautiful, smart scent, but as I mentioned, sadly isn’t one I believe I ought to be wearing since the fit isn’t quite right. I wonder if it is not a tricky scent to wear for many others, too.

Top image from jssgallery.org, of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket. Second image is Childe Hassam’s Fifth Avenue Nocturnes. I was sooooo tempted to exclusively use Hassam’s city street pictures, but this was the only one that felt right. If you have a moment though, do check out Hassam’s Paris Nocturne, as well as Whistler’s (yes, he’s the one with the mother) elegiac Nocturnes series.