Perfume in the west is conceived of mainly as sex juice. Spritz a perfume. Attract a man. Spritz a perfume. Be what every woman desires. There’s a new twist on this the past decade or so, too: spritz a perfume. Be a celebrity. A fascinating twist, since in this day and age there is nothing that so quite so simultaneously attracting and repellent as fame, with a whole lot of sexual fantasy tied up in that complicated bundle.
I suspect that a good chunk of perfume collectors are chasing a fantasy as much as they are a smell, and yes, a good chunk of that fantasy falls in the sex category.
And a lot of scents I just don’t use or don’t care to use fall under that sexual-association header: musk, which in natural form is illegal and nasty; florals which are in my opinion used to great effect and sometimes overused in many perfume houses both mainstream and niche; berry based fruits, which while not impossible to get naturally are also starting to verge on the trendy and overused.
I get frequent requests for sexy, sexy, sexy and while I understand the popularity, it’s not really what I do. Perhaps it’s due to a quirk of my personality: I actually can not be physically attracted to a person until I find him/her intellectually attractive. You can put a shirtless bohunk in front of me and I’ll be dead from the waist down until he starts talking to me about practical jokes he’s played using principles learned while getting his masters in physics.1 So, as a perfume artist, only a few of my fragrances explore the pure physical sexuality that mainstream houses constantly pursue.
What I do is more of an intellectual exercise, or maybe an emotional exercise. However you cut it, on some level it’s basically play of an almost childlike variety. This is in part because I started out not as a “magical perfumer” but as a “ritual oil” creator. My quick grasp of occult correspondences helped me product oils with specific purposes that were easily lined up and charged up. The advantage of ritual oil design is that you are under no obligation to make them smell good. I did find, however, things did tend to sell better if I at least tried to make the fragrance attractive, and pretty soon my clients from Medea’s Chariot were admitting to me that they were buying my purpose oils just to use as recreational perfume. Given that I sold to the goth and magical market, I was kind of floored. However, when I shut down for awhile I began to mix perfumes privately with aesthetics and intention in mind.
Sex and Politics is interesting in this discussion, because it is possibly the only perfume I currently sell created with mainstream perfume conventions in mind, and it was actually created as a bridge of aesthetics and magical purpose. I made it initially because of some very silly college-kid drama going on in a group I had been involved with; even though it captures the very essence of spice and intrigue, it’s actually about taking that crap and getting people to calm down. As the scent evaporates, so does the crazy (at least that’s what I intended.) I figured it would work best if the evaporation of the scent also happened to be a very pleasant experience. While I can’t say I cured the crazy – magic can never go against someone’s nature, just be incorporated into it – it did seem for a little while that the crazy relocated.
I bring this up because I feel like there’s so much more in the olfactory and aesthetic world than sex, and while sex does need more and different discussion from what is typical,2 in perfumeland it seems like it’s the only discussion. It’s not even really subtext, it’s just text, and any other aesthetic possibility gets almost unfairly consigned to aromatherapy. I’ve started a discussion on my Facebook fan page to encourage further discussion of this, and comments here are always also welcome.
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