From France to Dubai, scent is viewed as high art – but not in America. What is it about our relationship to smell that puts us so far behind in this field?This was the single most fun piece I’ve ever reported. It includes interviews with people whose work I’ve loved forever — Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume, Josh Meyer at Imaginary Authors, and smell experts Angela at Now Smell This and Anna at Twisted Lily — and includes the secret history of Estee Lauder, perfume as a feminist statement, why American perfume is considered some of the worst in the world, the history of scent-as-high-art in Japan and elsewhere, and, finally, some things I genuinely just loved to smell. Please read it! You will learn things and possibly smell better if you do!
::hyperventilates::
thepeacockangel, have you seen this?
also, i’m fascinated by the relationship of what we say we like as compared to what we actually like. I have a couple of very clean, soapy smells (partially because my mother is very allergic to a lot of the exciting stuff in perfume), but anything I wear for work —not just stuff I’ll put on when I happen to be going to work, but what I wear specifically to appeal to clients — isn’t just “not soapy” but is aggressively, smokey, musky, that-kinda-smells-like-underpants animalic. Like, in order of “most likely to make a client gasp and go “you smell AMAZING“ my most-frequently-used work perfumes are:
1. Tabu
2. My Sin
3. Mitsouko
4. Shalimar
5. Aromatics Elixir
So maybe this is something about my personal body chemistry — maybe I’m just a more indolic, sweaty person than average. And maybe some of this is that this makes me just smell different, and that’s enough to be appealing. But maybe not.
My clients seem to like it when I smell like lilacs or gardenia which is good cause I love those smells, but also really ??? in terms of what that’s about cause lilacs don’t seem dominatrix-y to me
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 