At Milan Design Week in 2025 there was one absolutely batshit installation: you had to fight your way through a dense forest of black ropes in near-total darkness, almost blind, to finally break out into a sunlit clearing full of white paper tuberoses under a pulsing star. I probably wouldn’t have paid it any attention, except it was about a perfume — Aldebaran, by Quentin Bisch and Marc-Antoine Barrois. Together they billed it as a perfume of optimism, per aspera ad astra, the white light of the stars, and tuberoses growing beneath them.

I read the news somewhere and relayed it to my husband with a snide comment: okay, so in 2025 optimism apparently requires several kilometers of designer silk cord and a two-hundred-euro niche fragrance.

So frightfully arty, much expensive, very screams of Milan Design Week, wow.

Still, these ropes stuck with me, and I did eventually make it (not through thorns to the stars, but close enough) to Aldebaran. The first thing I smelled was microwaved carrot-and-apple baby purée, scorched milk skin in an aluminum pot, boiled vegetables with that vile wet green smell of spinach, starchy paste, all in all almost nauseating.

And I’m just sitting there like: uhhhh, I was promised the glow of distant stars and eternal optimism, and instead I get a cannery and an assortment of every possible horror from childhood food, what the hell is this.

The purée was moving somewhere.

The future changed its direction

This April, a crew of three American astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch — along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, flew to within a minimal distance of the Moon (about six thousand kilometers) looped around the far side of the satellite, and returned to Earth. For the first time since Apollo 17, human bodies were once again in the vicinity of another world.

In 1961, when Gagarin made a single orbit around the Earth, the whole world was practically standing on its head for days. In 1969, hundreds of millions watched the Moon landing (and people still argue about it to this day).

The Artemis launch livestream had 1.2 million viewers on YouTube.

We all get that Bradbury, even though he wrote about Mars, wasn’t really writing about Mars at all, and Lem wasn’t really writing about Solaris, and the Strugatsky brothers’ books aren’t industrial novels about the daily grind of space pilots, engineers, and explorers. But they all still needed rockets — as a convenient way to open up a conversation about how the human of the future would change. Simply because, first, you had to deliver him into that future. After all, how do we talk about the future now? It’s something that’s ahead. But for twentieth-century sci-fi writers, it was something that was up above.

Right now we’re living in the future — one robot can deliver us to the store, and another one can run it. Except somehow this future turned out to be a little too... low. I mean, like — yeah, it’s fantastical. But it doesn’t really live up to that old dream of height.

Just consider this: people in the sixties pictured 2026 with lunar cities and apple orchards on Mars. We, in 2026, are hoping for maybe one thing — that the camera on the iPhone Pro stops being so huge and ugly. iPhones, actually, are a pretty easy way to explain how the future stopped being some other world and became an update to the current one, right?

Notice I’m not saying this is worse than apple orchards on Mars. But somehow it does a bad job of satisfying the human need to feel like there’s something big waiting in the future.

And then we’ve got celebrities in couture jumpsuits flying off to space like it’s some kind of very expensive retreat. And we start timidly lifting our eyes upward, but it’s unclear what we’re even looking for up there — surely not just an expensive retreat.

The unreachable star

The whole world has Jesus Christ Superstar as its top-of-mind answer to “rock opera?” — for the French, it’s Starmania, premiered in 1979.

In it, French composer Michel Berger tried to imagine the “collective West” some 20 years down the line, with its capital in the fantastical underground city of Monopolis where nothing evil happens. In other words, we didn’t rise to the stars, we went a hundred floors down.

So there’s this billionaire, Zéro Janvier. He made his fortune building skyscrapers. Being merely the richest man in the world has already gotten old for him, so he’s running for president. In his campaign speeches he promises to restore order by force and close the borders. Yes, yes — all of this was written in the seventies.

Zéro’s campaign is being seriously disrupted by “Les étolies noires” (“The Black Stars”) — a terrorist movement led by a certain Johnny Rockfort. He’s a very young boy, who over the course of the story turns — not without the help of the media machine, which builds a fandom around the terrorist attack — from a criminal into a superstar.

Watching all of this on TV from her café is our narrator-heroine, the waitress Marie-Jeanne, who’s just quietly dreaming that someday she’ll tell it all to hell and get out into the sun to grow tomatoes. I think you’ve already chosen your spiritual twin in this story. So have I.

Living in an underground city, she hasn’t seen the sun in many, many years. If she looks up, she’ll just see the top of Zéro Janvier’s golden tower. And at the top of that tower, there’s no star, but a disco.

The disco, by the way, is called Naziland.

Francophones have another song about striving for an unreachable star:

“Atteindre l’inaccessible étoile”. (“To reach the unreachable star”.)

This is Jacques Brel, “La quête.” The whole framing of the question is just absurd — if the star is unreachable, why the hell reach for it at all. But this is a song from a musical about Don Quixote. Who lives by the highest possible standard and deeply doesn’t give a damn how his aspirations line up with pathetic reality.

I first came across Brel by chance on TV. I almost felt ashamed watching him, like I’m spying on something deeply intimate, something normal people let maybe five people in their whole life witness. He’s sweating like he’s unloading train cars, pulling terrifying faces, his white hands are flickering before your eyes against the black background, TOO MUCH OF EVERYTHING. I mean, it’s ugly, it’s literally physically hard to watch.

And impossible to look away from.

The French have this beautiful phrase: bête de scène, “a beast of the stage”. There are people who literally come alive the moment they root themselves into the stage and pierce the audience with something like a beam of pure energy.

If I want to explain the Brel phenomenon to someone, I’ll just put on covers of Brel. He’s very easy to “do”: stand hunched over, flail your arms for all you’re worth, rasp, pull faces, and then at the end you can just collapse, like, well, that’s it, died on stage. It looks, of course, just plain tacky, a bad actor squeezing drama out of himself. You can squeeze out the faces, sure, but that’s surface-level, that’s the consequence, not the cause. The cause is some kind of internal pressure, that nerve that makes the whole body sing: chanter de tout son corps, and give more than the body’s resources even allow. Take only these odd mannerisms, and what you get isn’t a beast — it’s a stuffed one.

And then I’ll put on Bowie.

In his Brel covers he does the one right thing: he doesn’t try to be Brel at all and becomes maximally Bowie. Brel, heart turned inside out, sobbing, pushes the poor song out of his body, whereas otherworldly, bodiless Bowie scares you in a different way.

Art moves forward sometimes if a new beast steps into old material. So Quentin Bisch does something very similar, only with perfume.

Bête de parfum

With Quentin Bisch it’s simple. He tells a story about himself that explains basically everything, and if the story didn’t exist, it would be worth inventing. He’s 11, first day in a new class, the students are waiting for the French teacher.

Je ne l’ai pas vue arriver, je l’ai sentie arriver. (I didn’t see her come in, I smelled her come in.)

The teacher wasn’t wearing just any perfume — she was wearing Opium.

That’s it, nothing more needs to be said after that. If you were making a movie about some perfumer who’s brilliant at making perfumes that switch on the spotlight before the person’s even walked into the room, and you had to come up with a concise scene about his origin story, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than this.

My choice of the spotlight metaphor here, by the way, probably wasn’t an accident either: before perfumery, Bisch studied theater and ran a theater company. So basically, if Brel is a bête de scène, then Bisch is 100% a bête de parfum.

He has this incredible, completely animal instinct for the nerve of the time — for how to make perfumes people will fall in love with. Working off the Ganymede or Guidance brief, you could easily have ended up with very pretty scents that you smell once and never think about again. But Bisch, in his best work, always spins up this kind of insane vortex that literally pulls the audience in.

It repeats too often for it to just be down to the marketing machine. Delina, Ganymede, Guidance, Hibiscus Mahajad, Bois Impérial — the list goes on for a while, and it’s like the old joke: once is chance, twice is coincidence, but three times is a habit. And every time some perfume shows up that ends up smelling out of every elevator and every street, Bisch’s name has been coming up suspiciously often these past few years. And when people complain about modern perfumes being too loud in general — again, his surname is usually the one that surfaces fast.

The volume in Bisch’s perfumes is the easy part, though. Anyone can take enough sufficiently diffusive materials and get a giant cloud (or sometimes a mushroom cloud) that’ll live in an elevator for two days straight. But not every loud, long-lasting perfume is Ganymede, just as not everyone who gets up on stage and waves their arms around energetically, pulling terrifying faces, is Jacques Brel.

Now you see what matters in that story about the perfume and the teacher? A different kid would have remembered and, years later, described the perfume itself, the notes, or for that matter the teacher — going by her choice of signature scent, there was clearly something worth remembering there. This kid describes a stage effect: the smell changed the scene before the actor even appeared.

It’s very easy to badly mimic Bisch’s style. Take three buckets of long-lasting diffusive materials, some unusual contrast, crank the amberwoods up another notch or two, and, well, that’s it. It’s not. What you’ll get is roughly the singer who watched Brel and decided the answer was to wave his arms around harder. Copying what Bisch has already done is trivial. Finding the nerve from which he unravels what actually needs to be done — that’s the much harder problem.

And you see this really clearly with Aldebaran. The concept itself — a star, the light of distant planets, a field of tuberose, cosmic optimism — for almost anyone else, that would come together into one simple solution. Ok, let’s take a giant white flower, stick it front and center, let it shine, radiate, diffuse. Tuberose is a diva, after all, and a diva runs a real risk of tipping over into flawlessness so total it gets boring.

But Bisch starts the story of a distant star with purée, scorched milk, and boiled vegetables in an aluminum pot.

Here it feels like exactly that kind of directorial effect. If you turn the light on right away and then make it stronger, the climax won’t hit as bright. So you’ll have to switch it off completely first, and the diva will have to be someone else for a couple of hours, so that afterward she can actually blind everyone.

A flower in time

Well, let’s get back to the purée. After this first very chaotic and strange stage, the path and the struggle begin. Through the pot, the milk skin, the vegetables and the purée, through childhood thorns that later so often turn into nostalgia, because how the skinned knees hurt — you forget, but how much joy you felt being alive — you don’t; and we, too, are made of our previous, and often not the most pleasant, states of self. So together with the fragrance’s heroine we push our way toward the light. And we see a beautiful, blinding flower, which had been walking this whole road with us.

And mind you, literally — it’s not that she waited around and showed up after the vile beginning, no, she was with you the whole time, and she was made out of it.

What is a classic chypre, essentially? — it’s a reconstructed scent of a plant (flower, fruit, herb, whatever, could be all of it together), and it has to have roots in the soil, or on a tree with branches and leaves, that’s the key point. So at the bottom we’ve got moss, to root the whole construction, in the middle something beautiful, and on top we pour citrus over all of it, so their sparkle gives that beautiful thing a sense of being alive.

Aldebaran adds one more coordinate to this scheme — time. Look not only at the flower from head to toe, but at what it was before it became a flower, out of what rubbish it grew. Look at all the stages of its states of matter. Ugliness as an early form of beauty.

I was thrilled to find out that for the Mission Aldebaran exhibition they even drew a comic book — it just begs to be a comic, this whole thing, storyboarding a story of a journey and a transformation. Space and comics have always gone hand in hand, not only and not so much because sci-fi got drawn a lot just to be able to imagine some kind of future at all. It’s simply that comics are better at depicting jumps in time and space, it’s a perfectly natural language in which it’s very convenient to dream about space.

What remains

Let’s go back for a moment again to Starmania. At the end there’s this terrifying climax: Zéro is celebrating his victory in the elections at Naziland, and it’s this dazzling, horrifying satan’s ball — evil has won, and meanwhile Les étoiles noires have plotted to blow up the Golden Tower, all 121 floors of it. They get revealed, Johnny Rockfort’s beloved Cristal dies in a shootout, Johnny holds her and sings her one last lullaby.

In this song, which is called S.O.S. d’un terrien en détresse — S.O.S. of an earthling in distress, he, among other things, sings straight out that he’s spent his whole life, so to speak, mixing up comics and life.

A little over 20 years ago, I had a dream: to see a real Starmania on stage. I was 14, I’d just arrived in a foreign unwelcoming city. Music was my escape from reality, Starmania was a bright ray of light in the darkness. I listened to it endlessly, cried my eyes out, translated the lyrics, argued on forums about different versions and interpretations, drew comics about Johnny Rockfort with a friend during class... and dreamed that someday there’d be a new version of Starmania and I would absolutely go and see it.

And just imagine — it wasn’t staged, wasn’t staged, and then Thomas Jolly’s production happened. You’ve probably at least heard of this director in passing, since he directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the Paris Olympics.

So I went to see it in 2024.

I’m sitting in the hall, it’s already the finale, Johnny is singing or crying his S.O.S. Over the years, across different productions, Johnny has accumulated several different endings — he’d get thrown in prison, he’d die quietly next to Cristal, and in the very first version he’d turn out to be an alien and ascend to the heavens, because reasons.

Johnny finishes the last “sleep, my love,” and on the final syllable he lifts his eyes to the audience, looks at us so slyly, so expressively, says that last “sleep”...

...and blows the whole rotten circus to hell. And naturally he flies up to the heavens right along with his beloved. These Romeo and Juliet of the atomic age become, for one brief moment, real black stars in the sky.

And that sly look right before the explosion — that’s the most terrifying moment of the whole production. He looks at the audience, at us, the people who’d applauded him for two hours, who over those two hours had become his personal fandom around a terrorist act, and metaphorically, in the end, he blows us up too. Jolly skinned the beast and found something under there scarier than the original.

Fourteen-year-old me would never have blown up Naziland at the end. And that’s exactly why this Starmania fulfilled my old dream: the people who made it weren’t fulfilling my dream — for all those twenty long years, they’d been dreaming their own.

65 years

The star Aldebaran is 65 light-years away from us. If we look at the starry sky right now, we’ll see the light from it that set out toward us 65 years ago.

In 1961.

Gagarin makes the first orbit around the Earth. The light begins to move.

Then people land on the Moon, stop flying there, invent personal computers, iPhones, Starlink, generative AI...

The light is still flying.

And now in 2026, when for the first time in decades, people are flying very far from the Earth again, the light from the year when it all began has only just reached us.

When we think of 1961, we more often remember the dream of space, Gagarin’s smile, but that same year the Berlin Wall was built, and the USSR detonated the Tsar Bomba. You see, astra was never separable from the aspera, we just don’t draw the zinc buckets and coffins on the postcards.

Now we’re in a time like that again, and the easiest thing is to wrap yourself in armor made of cynicism. Cynicism is a very simple position in general: say that everything is bad and it’s going to get worse, and right away you look smarter, and everybody wants to nod along and call you very perceptive. The one problem is that cynicism can’t build anything.

To build a rocket, someone has to be the first to step out and say: guys, this state of affairs is possibly not the final one, another order of things is possible. I’ve been looking at this vile carrot-and-apple purée in an aluminum can, and you know, I can see that it’s still moving somewhere, still maybe turning into something. This person will of course be asked for a thousand proofs, nobody will nod along, and hardly anyone will call him smart. But if even one person believes him, there’s a chance we all get to see a dazzlingly white, beautiful tuberose.

The one who steps forward is always someone specific. And he does it for someone specific too. Light is somebody’s labor, addressed to somebody.

In 1961 the light of the first year of spaceflight sets out from Aldebaran toward Earth. Brel is singing Don Quixote, Bowie is dreaming up Ziggy Stardust, Michel Berger is writing Starmania, a teacher perfumes herself with Opium first thing in the morning...

Light knows how to travel the other way too.

Bisch and Barrois made Aldebaran for us, so that we could wear it, so that we could watch a snow-white, majestic flower gradually emerge out of a grey-brown-murky mass.

No one, after all, ever promised that the scent of thorns would be delicate, or that everyone would like it.

PS If you've read this far, then here's a song for you. It was this one that became my main ray of hope in my coming back to Starmania 20 years later. In the new production there's a very beautiful scene where Cristal turns from a girl into a woman, changing out of her sparkling tele-dress into the black-and-blue spacesuit-costume of the Black Stars. And at the end she showers the hall with pink heart-shaped confetti. They flew all the way over to me and I saved a few of them. I still keep those hearts as a memento — they remind me that things can be good. And France Gall sings this song with such an unstoppable, physically felt joy of being alive.

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Last weekend I finally worked up the nerve to watch Ariana Grande’s new video, Petal. The plot is as straightforward as a plank: Ariana plays an actress who goes to an audition, gets a verdict of NOT GOOD ENOUGH from an all-male panel, changes herself according to their scorecard, and comes back. Then again. And again. Make your face more approachable, add some sex appeal, oh no, now tone it down, ugh, how vulgar and basic, this is too complicated, anyway, thank you, make the necessary adjustments and come back. Meanwhile, a daisy growing out of a crack in a Hollywood star loses another petal every time she returns.

There’s something deeply infantilizing about this whole setup to me. Somewhere, there are adults who know exactly how things are supposed to be, and your job is to behave, correct your mistakes, show them your improved work and wait for the grade. Well? Well? Am I good now?

At the end, we’re presented with Ariana-as-Pepper supposedly refusing to play the game anymore: she grabs a chainsaw and takes out the whole pompous committee along with its scorecards. The women waiting in line for their auditions applaud her; she sits there covered in blood, looking extremely pleased with herself, cracks open a fortune cookie with her hands still in bloody lace gloves, and pulls out a slip that says “you bloom wherever you’re planted”. Then we discover that the whole thing was a film within a film. The director showers her with praise, and outside, ecstatic fans are screaming for autographs.

I found the whole thing creepy and unpleasant to watch. I mean, first you drive someone to the edge by making them conform to a set of unwritten rules imposed by other people, and then at the end you hand them a diploma: there you go, now you qualify, now you’re blooming, good girl, have a cookie. Mental illness doesn’t necessarily feel like “oh my God, what is happening to me?” It would obviously be much easier if it were always that clear. More often, you’re looking out from inside some private mental darkness and you actually like what you see, and at some point the committee finally stamps you GOOD ENOUGH. Does that have anything to do with reality? Probably not.

And then, on top of all that, Ariana looks the way she looks in the video. Taken together with the plot, that has sparked a huge amount of discussion online.

Missed Me?

Exactly two years ago, the internet was having roughly the same conversation about Lana Del Rey’s changing body. There wasn’t the same concern for her life or health, but there were a lot of people saying, “I know her secret.” I had just watched the South Park Ozempic special, and one line had lodged itself in my head: “Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.” Then I wrote several very, very agitated posts on Twitter.

I’d always said that if you give someone with an unconventional body a shortcut to a conventional one, they’ll take it. We’re now watching that happen among Hollywood celebrities on a massive scale. But I didn’t want then, and don’t want now, to stand there playing prosecutor and saying, “I know their secret”. What scared me was thinking about the people who won’t be given the shortcut.

“Fucking anorexia, we weren’t exactly missing you,” I wrote at the time.

We’ve been here before. In 1997, sibutramine came onto the market, another appetite suppressant, which worked by essentially “switching off” certain parts of the brain. It very quickly became something close to an epidemic among celebrities and beyond, and in 2010 it was pulled from the market because of cardiovascular risks.

Sibutramine was a huge part of the infrastructure that made the insane thinness craze of the 2000s possible. How did it use to work? Unless you were born with freakishly lucky genetics, you basically had to spend your whole life working your ass off and keeping yourself on a tight leash. And then suddenly it turned out there might be an easier way.

“Universe, do you understand that when we asked for our 2007 back, we meant side-swept bangs, Juicy Couture tracksuits and Motorola Razrs? Take this other shit back wherever you got it from. Thanks, please.”

I wasn’t actually joking, because in the summer of 2009 I was twenty years old and weighed 38 kilos at 172 cm. I’m giving you those numbers because they save me from having to spend several paragraphs explaining, in a tragic voice, how serious it was.

I secretly threw food away. Eating with other people was terrifying, because food is much harder to hide and throw out when there are witnesses. I wore a warm sweater in August when it was 30°C outside. The smallest scratch would bleed for hours. Every day, many times a day, I lied to people I loved.

I looked in the mirror and saw a fat person.

I Want Not to Want

My anorexia came as part of a package deal with anxiety and depression, so none of those romantic pro-ana stories about butterfly girls and jutting collarbones ever did anything for me. I just wanted to keep getting smaller and smaller. To take up less space, need less, attract less attention. And eventually become so light that I could disappear altogether.

At the same time, I wanted to scream, as loudly as possible: will somebody please just take care of me already?!

Look at me, please, look how badly I’m doing. Stop me. Make it so that I don’t have to be the one deciding whether I eat or don’t eat, whether I’m coping or not, whether I’m good enough, what I’m supposed to do with my body, or with my life at all.

It seems to me that Ozempic has become, for many people, not so much a weight-loss drug as a way to turn down the endless radio station playing songs about food inside their heads.

I once got sucked into a forum where people were describing their experiences of losing weight on GLP-1s. What they describe sounds almost fantastically relieving. Just a couple of quotes.

“I try to eat three times a day and not skip meals so I don’t end up in a massive deficit. I can easily forget to eat, but I try not to and keep my calories at a normal level so there isn’t some horrible rebound when I stop the injections. What I really like is the psychological feeling of being free from food. I don’t think about it. Food has somehow become uninteresting, just fuel.”

“My brain is no longer occupied at all with ‘what should I eat’ or ‘I desperately need something to chew on.’ I stopped being this ‘creature that’s always eating’ and constantly thinking about food, and suddenly I had the energy and motivation to do other things: I started dancing, picked up hobbies — I paint at a studio, etc.”

“I’m honestly f*cking stunned. I don’t want food anymore lol. I’m cooking for my husband — it smells good, but I don’t want any of it. At. All. I just don’t want food. I’m not fantasizing about it, I don’t even want to look at it lol. This has literally never happened to me before.”

If you’ve spent any amount of time in a state where thoughts about food are screaming in your head from morning until night (and I have), the idea of silence sounds almost religious. You no longer have to invent one trick after another to make yourself eat less.

You can simply want less.

Anorexia nervosa, despite its Latin name (literally, “absence of appetite”) works in exactly the opposite way. Hunger takes over all the available space. Entire days, your whole life, begin to revolve around food. And somewhere deep underneath it all lives the fantasy that if you can just make your body small and disciplined enough, it will finally leave you alone.

In the 1970s, there was a strand of psychotherapy whose proponents described anorexia nervosa, almost romantically, as a flight from growth. Of course, nobody in the scientific community takes that idea very seriously today; the mechanisms and risk factors behind the illness are obviously far more complex than “a girl is afraid of becoming a woman.” But I do think there is sometimes a thread connecting anorexia and infantilization — not always, not for everyone, but the illness can push you into a distinctly childlike position. In a way, anorexia takes some of the responsibility for your body out of your hands by gathering other people around it: people who care how much you weigh, whether you’ve eaten today. And they gather almost inevitably, because, well, see above.

An adult body wants food, sleep, water, calories, protein, and a great many other things. It sweats, smells, ages, hurts; it is constantly demanding maintenance. You can think of yourself as a magical little fairy floating above all that as much as you like, but sooner or later the body will remind you: sorry, we are, in fact, an animal.

And this brings us back to Ariana Grande. Because music and movies aren’t her only business. She also sells perfume.

Where Did the Adult Body Go?

Take any vintage perfume (if you can find one, of course) and just smell how much body there is in it. Old chypres weren’t only about precious oakmoss; there was almost always fur, leather, and all sorts of frankly shameless animalics. I won’t even get started on indolic white flowers. Up until sometime in the 1980s, nobody had forgotten that human beings are mammals.

We haven’t started doubting human origins just yet, and old man Darwin has not, as far as I know, been disproved. But animalic perfumes, for a whole variety of reasons, retreated into niche perfumery — increasingly into indie, really.

In perfumery, the cancellation of the human body began in the 1990s. First, the idea was to scrub the human being completely clean. L’Eau d’Issey, CK One, Acqua di Giò — green tea, ozone, cucumber; basically, this is what a person smells like the moment they step out of the shower. They have no intention of sweating.

Angel crashed the party in 1992 looking like the one girl nobody had told about the dress code. The cotton candy, praline and chocolate came straight from the fairground Mugler had given Cresp as a reference, sure, but this was no place for children. The patchouli in it was downright otherworldly, intensely camphoraceous, even a little graveyard-like. As if someone at that fair had become a little too sweet and got eaten. Angel became a signature scent for sexy lionesses, hellcats and all kinds of dangerous women, and it suited them endlessly well: thick, dirty, and openly sensual.

The respectable guests at the party looked at her like, uhhhhhh, okay, and declined to follow.

Some fifteen years later, gourmand perfumes finally became fashionable, but they came back as something else entirely. Fluffy, milky, creamy, soft, clean. Marshmallow, cotton candy, vanilla frosting. Still food, technically, but only the kind children like, and God forbid there should be any tobacco, booze, or olives in it. (Olives, actually? Are there perfumes about olives? I know there’s at least one about garlic.)

So first we scrubbed the human being squeaky clean, and then spread a layer of vanilla meringue on top. That was the new dress code: a body stripped of adult physiology, with marshmallows added for good measure.

And on top of that, gourmand perfumery in its current form is often completely legible as food, sometimes almost indistinguishable from actual food flavorings, except it’s food that can’t make you gain weight. Half the sensory information of dessert, for zero calories.

Pepper and Fame Inc.

Ariana Grande perfumes sell extremely well.

Cloud is a whipped touch of crème de coconut, indulgent praline, creamy woods. Sweet Like Candy — sugar-frosted blackberry, fluffy marshmallow, sexy vanilla. Cloud Aurora is described as a vanilla-kissed daydream, spun sugar, fluffy musk, vanilla-dipped petals, and r.e.m. cherry eclipse — whipped marshmallow meringue and comforting warm musks.

And do you know what her new music brand is called? Babydoll Music.

If you were hoping to catch me out with the fact that she doesn’t write the marketing copy herself and doesn’t compose the perfume formulas either, I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m perfectly aware that a major corporation has teams of professionals for that. But there is still a certain irony in the fact that a woman people have spent the last couple of years arguing about — whether it’s time to sound the alarm over how thin she is, or whether we shouldn’t make assumptions about someone’s health based on appearance — also makes money, among other things, from scents that smell like sweets.

My feelings about this, as you can probably imagine given my background, are complicated and mixed. Ariana is 33. For all her wide-eyed, permanently frightened doe look, she is no longer the girl from the music video being ground up by a merciless industry. And I don’t think anyone forced her to trade the persona of the confident and confidence-inspiring woman with the high ponytail for that of a fragile fairy with a trembling lower lip.

This is the point where I’m supposed to wring my hands and cry, “Oh God, what kind of example is she setting for young women?” And I nearly did.

But today’s teenage trendsetters are always yesterday’s teenagers. And we’ve already talked about what it was like to be a teenage girl in the 2000s: not much sweetness. Ariana of course didn’t pluck the whole Pepper story out of thin air. Still, I believe very strongly that real adulthood begins precisely when you’re ready to take care of other people and to accept responsibility for them.

By now, in that story, she’s no longer only Pepper — she’s Fame Inc. too. And I’m not sure she’s quite realized that yet.

I Have a Girl to Raise Here

In 2007 tabloids called Tyra Banks “America’s Next Top Waddle”. The same year Britney Spears walked onto the VMA stage in a sequined bikini and was mocked for being fat. Go look at that photos now. Seriously. Go look now.

This is what scares me more than any pill: how easily and quickly tastes change. By the way, hi to the people “unaffected by advertising and fashion,” I hope you’ll save us all, if you actually exist.

In the nineties perfumery became young. In place of the distant, otherworldly woman in the style of Chanel and Guerlain came a young girl with lipstick smeared across her teeth, and what she needed was fun, simple, silly perfume. But then the girl grew up, and the industry somehow never figured out what to do with her next.

“I’m eighteen, I’m a tiny airy fairy, and my whole life is ahead of me” sells beautifully. Years go by, and at some point you have to grow up and learn to use a more complex vocabulary. But perfumery somehow got dumbly stuck on warmth, milk, and sugar.

Back then, in tweets from two years ago, I also wrote: “I’ve got a girl to raise here.” And of course, it would be maximally stupid to hold Ariana Grande or brand-name perfumers responsible for her. I look in the mirror with her around, I eat, I sometimes give away, without meaning to, through a glance or a half-word, some judgment about my appearance. Omg, I mean even the fact that I write about perfume, and I have so much of it, and by many people’s account I have a remarkably developed sense of smell. I don’t want to go looking for some extra causality in that, but still — it’s sensory pleasure, roughly half of the pleasure of eating, and you can get it without eating anything. I did write about Ariana that culture is carried best by those whom that very culture has roughed up the most — of course I was writing more about myself there than about her.

Thankfully, around my daughter I’m not just eating and checking myself in the mirror — I also work, earn money, I’m interested in a thousand things, I can have my own opinion and argue with anyone of any gender and hold my ground. Not a Wonderwoman, of course, but I really try to be an example for her that a grown woman isn’t just a shriveled-up girl.

While I was writing the post, I listened to more Ariana Grande than in my entire previous life combined. The track that really got to me was “7 rings” — I want it, I got it, and in the neon-pink video she sprawls out on a kitchen island, swinging a high ponytail. Ariana herself calls the song an anthem of friendship (”Buy matching diamonds for six of my bitches / I’d rather spoil all my friends with my riches”), but for millions of people around the world the track became a mantra of confidence and self-love.

Now, that self-assured woman turned back into a little girl who’s afraid of making mistakes, tries to please everyone, and looks up searchingly for approval. Even her bloody rebellion starts from that same position.

A song can always be turned off, a dress can be taken off, but no dress and no song can give a person that same emotional palette that scents can — simply by the very nature of scent itself. That’s why I still do care what kind of variety will be sitting on that very first shelf in the perfume shop, the one my daughter will walk up to when she picks out her first perfume.

I don’t want to take away the little airy fairy’s marshmallow cloud — let it stay. Just please give the fairy a choice for when she wants to come down to earth from it. Let there be, after “I’m small, I’m light, and it’s all still ahead of me,” a range of grown-up images and emotions — I want, I choose, I eat, I work, sometimes I smell like sweat, I take up more space than some people would like, and I remain magnificent. I want it, I got it.

Perfume is really good at helping us, for a few hours, want to be — or even become — someone else. It would be even better if it sometimes reminded us: growing up is one of the available options.

Cue the credits.

I only fully grasped the scale of Metal Lavender once I got home.

I took off the top that had caught some of the perfume cloud while I was spraying it onto a blotter. The top smelled of Metal Lavender as though I had actually bathed it in the stuff.

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Back at the store, the sales assistant had just had time to tell me cheerfully, “It’s extremely long-lasting, with incredible sillage!” Yes. Yes, indeed. If humanity ever needs to transmit the smell of Ambrocenide to the next geological era, this thing will survive a nuclear war, and its sillage will continue drifting majestically over the radioactive ash.

The lavender itself doesn’t stick around for long, which is understandable: it knows perfectly well what happens next and has sensibly decided it would rather not be here. At the beginning, it gives a few thin, incoherent squeaks from behind a frame of metallic aldehydes, and then 100% of the available oxygen is occupied by an enormous dry amber-woody-Cashmeran construction that eats into your nose and eyes like when you’re chopping onions. Smell-wise, the closest comparison I can offer is a wet dog that has rolled around in construction dust, but that part may simply reflect my own private relationship with beauty.

At moments like this, the reactionary old fart inside me wakes up immediately and feels an irresistible urge to lecture the foolish children of today about how the grass used to be greener, the trees taller, the sky bluer, the girls younger, but alas, we have squandered everything, the barbarians are at the gates, and the entire industry might as well shut down. Back in my day! They didn’t have all this nonsense! Oakmoss was poured into perfume straight from under the bloody oak tree! Everything was natural, and now they’re poisoning us with chemicals! Where is my hazard-pay?

But I don’t actually think that.

I love plenty of perfumes made within this deafening contemporary aesthetic, and some of them I think are genuinely beautiful. I just can’t wear them, because on my skin I don’t so much smell the perfume itself as I hear it shouting. I tried, God knows I tried. But the greatest achievement of my attempts to make friends with these guys is that I now know perfume comes off best with hydrophilic oil, slightly less well with micellar water, and there’s no point scrubbing your wrist with alcohol. (Write that down!)

With bad loud perfumes, it’s easy. A bad song doesn’t get better just because you turn the volume down. But what the hell are you supposed to do when the song is beautiful, except someone has turned it all the way up and hidden the remote?! Maybe I do want to listen to it. I just want to listen to it at a normal volume. And that’s what makes the whole conversation about loud perfumes more complicated.

But I promised to get to the reasons. I think that several things converged here. Perfumery got very good at making a scent feel enormous without making it dense or heavy, and the companies and their marketing teams discovered how easy it was to turn longevity and projection into selling points. And all of this landed in a culture where, over the past ten or fifteen years, all of us seem to have developed a certain desire to take up more space in the world, in all sorts of ways. Perfume simply became another way to do it.

Guys, look what the chemists brought us

A chemist walks onstage.

Chemist: “Guys, look what I’ve got!”

Perfumers smell it: “Whoa. Cool stuff. What happens if we use, like, a lot of it?”

Chemist: “Well, actually, you probably shouldn’t —”

Perfumers: “Right, got it. Half a bucket, then.”

One of these cool new things for example, was ethyl vanillin. So a chemist comes to Jacques Guerlain and says: look what we’ve got. Guerlain first adds a few drops to Jicky, and it works beautifully. Then apparently thinks: okay, but what if half a bucket?

And, more or less, that is how we get Shalimar. There’s even a story that Shalimar started with some unlucky lab assistant tripping and pouring way too much ethyl vanillin into Jicky. These days it’s hard to imagine Shalimar without a century of history attached to it, but at the time this was revolutionarily bold.

Then another chemist walks in and goes: “Guys, look, brand-new stuff. Barely smells of anything on its own, but it takes up a ridiculous amount of space and makes pretty much anything around it feel bigger.”

And Geza Schoen goes: “Wow, thanks. I think I’ll just pour in an entire bucket of this and call it a day. Nothing else needed!”

In other words, he took the old joke to its logical absurdity.

And the public went: “Holy shit, WOW! It smells like my skin, only better! Pheromones! Aphrodisiacs! Give me two!”

Today, of course, Iso E Super looks positively respectable, like a kindly old grandfather. But I remember people complaining about its overdoses in exactly the same terms when I first got into perfume: synthetic, piercing, drilling into my skull, can’t wear it, get it away from me.

And then Francis Kurkdjian walks in:

— Guys, look what I mixed.

Everyone sniffs.

— Whoa. Why is it so huge?

— No idea. Half a bucket of everything.

This was, of course, the great and the terrible Baccarat Rouge 540. It’s enormous and at the same time it weighs nothing. I’d define it as a skyscraper made of cockerel lollipops and medical bandages, and it’s floating in mid-air.

By the time the amberwoods arrive, nobody walks onstage anymore. There is no longer anyone in the room whose job it is to say you probably shouldn’t.

The cheapest real estate on the market

Perfume is discussed a bit like laptops now. There are just two specs people use to decide whether a perfume is good or a waste of money.

— How long does the battery last?

— Eight hours.

— Ouch. Not great. Can it handle heavy workloads?

— I’d say about fifty square meters.

— Ah, ok, now we’re talking.

And this is not nearly as stupid as you’ve just decided it is.

Two hundred and fifty euros for the right to occupy fifty cubic meters of somebody else’s air for twelve hours is, calculated per square meter, the cheapest real estate on the market.

For a lot of people, it is now more or less the only kind they can afford. In the 1990s, UK house prices were about 3.5 times the average salary. Now they’re around eight times. In the US, they’ve gone from just over three times to five. And then there is the good old lipstick effect: when making grand plans for the future feels increasingly pointless, you can at least buy yourself one small luxury. Try reading today’s news for ten minutes straight. Any further questions?

There is another parallel I’m very fond of, although I can’t prove any causal connection. Right around the same time perfumes begin inflating to the size of skyscrapers, Demna appears in fashion: first launching Vetements in 2014, then moving to Balenciaga. And off we go. Look what I’ve got: a puffer jacket — not just any puffer jacket, mind you, a family of four can wear it at once. Economical! A t-shirt the size of a modest piece of farm machinery? That’s XXS, just so we’re clear. Vogue would later call the 2010s the era of dressing for Instagram: clothes had to grab you instantly and say something loud enough to stop the scroll. Perfume does exactly the same thing in an elevator, with the added advantage that you don’t have to cover yourself in LV logos like a suitcase.

You don’t have to look far for examples. I can almost always tell which of my neighbors took the elevator before me. And there’s a guy at my gym who douses himself in Megamare before working out, so the rest of us spend the entire session collectively swimming in his seaweed soup. Once I actually went up to him and asked what perfume it was, purely so I’d know which bottles to stay away from. I’m afraid he took it as a compliment.

So really, it makes perfect sense. Make the thing loud enough that someone in the elevator has to ask what you’re wearing. Whether they’re asking because they want it too or because they need to know what to avoid is almost beside the point. Either way, they noticed.

Aldebaran

If you want a poor little flower being bullied by modern amberwoods, tuberose is really the wrong one to pick. Fracas was already making a scene in 1948. Then came Giorgio Beverly Hills and Poison in the 80s, both famously huge even by 80s standards, which is saying something. There are stories of restaurants asking people not to wear them.

Enter Aldebaran.

Complaining that Aldebaran is too big is completely beside the point. The scale is the whole point of its composition. And there is a composition here, and it is…

…absolutely stunning.

For quite a long time, what’s taking shape in front of you doesn’t even resemble perfume. It’s something technical and vegetal, rubbery and metallic, with a strange milky undertone. Imagine an accident at a canning factory, with some non-zero probability that, eventually, a flower might somehow grow out of the wreckage.

And it does!

Out of the rubber, aluminium tanks, burnt milk, greenery and all that factory chaos, a tuberose gradually comes together. It becomes beautiful exactly because it remembers every unpleasant thing it has just fought its way through. It has a story to tell, possibly to give a statement to the police.

I have zero desire to approach it with a red pencil:

— Ok, remove the rubber. The milk is weird, could we smooth it out and make it conventionally creamy without the burnt part? Errrrrr, vegetables with milk? That can’t possibly be good for digestion. And while we’re at it, could the opening be a little more pleasant? And quieter, please. There are people here.

No. I like Aldebaran exactly as it is. My only problem with it is that it has sat down five centimeters from my face, put a hand on my shoulder, and has now been telling me this absolutely gripping story for three hours straight, while I can’t move my chair back and get some air.

“Then just do one spray”

Dab it on, use a needle, etc etc. I know.

The amazing thing about modern bases is that doing one spray instead of three doesn’t give you a smaller, more intimate version of the composition. Instead, it just gives you less of the composition. The top and middle notes come through more faintly, the transitions get thinner, while the huge woody-amber or musky framework keeps yelling at exactly the same volume. Remember my poor lavender from the beginning? There you go.

In thirty years, today’s thermonuclear woody ambers and synthetic musks will smell cozy and old-fashioned. Today’s tiktokers will complain about how perfumers used to care about composition, how things just aren’t what they used to be, how Ambrofix back in our day was such a delicate material, you don’t get that kind of subtlety of the transitions anymore.

And somewhere nearby, a chemist will be showing a perfumer a new molecule.

— Psssst, look what I’ve got.

— Wow, great stuff. What if I use a lot?

— Well, you’re not really supposed to use a lo —

— Got it. Half a bucket it goes.

In the meantime, I would very much like everyone involved in Metal Lavender to reflect on what they have done, go to church, light a candle, and start worrying about the state of their immortal soul.

Once a month, I’ll answer one stupid perfume question at unreasonable length. Subscribe if you have more.

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First, the gasoline

The first thing you smell when you apply Tubéreuse Criminelle to your skin is gasoline.

It does not vaguely resemble gasoline, nor does it “open with a cold industrial accord” as a press release might put it. It smells honestly and unequivocally of gasoline: camphor, something rubbery and medicinal, almost a treatment room.

The normal reaction of a normal person is to assume that the perfume has either gone bad or should never smell like this in the first place.

But after about ten minutes, the camphor leaves. And underneath it, you find tuberose, thick, creamy, almost indecently in bloom, one of the most beautiful tuberoses you can encounter anywhere in perfumery.

Those first few minutes do not stand between you and the flower by accident, they are as much a part of the artwork as the flower itself. First the fragrance repels you, then it makes you wait, and only after that does it allow you closer.

This is a good way to understand not only Tubéreuse Criminelle, but Serge Lutens in general. This brand prefers not to give you everything beautiful at once. There must always be some kind of obstacle between the person and the object: gasoline, a heavy stopper, an inconspicuous door, a name that explains nothing. Even in interviews, Lutens himself phrases his thoughts as though they were fragments of a play whose beginning you (and all of us, to be honest) have missed.

Today, this idea has already become a parody of itself. A supposedly “underground” restaurant with no sign must, by definition, be more interesting than an ordinary one. Something that is difficult to buy is more desirable than something sitting calmly on a shelf in any shop. And if an expensive perfume initially smells of bandages, a garage, or a wet stable, that is not a flaw at all: it is simply complex and not for everyone.

Sometimes, of course, a stable is just a stable.

I am beginning with Lutens because he was one of the first to assemble many of the things we now automatically recognise as “niche perfume house” into a coherent world: dark bottles, mysterious names, a hidden shop, a founder who is the central figure in his own mythology, and perfumes that are not obliged to please you immediately. Today this language seems natural. But once, someone had to invent it.

For me, it all began not with Tubéreuse Criminelle, but with Arabie.

Arabie was my first niche fragrance, although at the time I thought about neither niche perfumery, nor Shiseido, nor who exactly had created the formula. I simply discovered that perfume could work in a way entirely unlike anything I had known before.

It smelled of an Eastern bazaar where sacks of spices, dried figs, candied mandarin peel, wood, and resins had all been opened at once. Everything shouted, jostled, and pushed its way into your nose. And when the clamour subsided a little, a rose appeared at the centre, dark, slightly bitter, and utterly unmistakable.

Roses, roses, roses. How I love those Lutens roses.

On the skin, Arabie behaved like the ghost of a merchant with countless arms. It seemed that the fragrance had already disappeared, but all you had to do was turn your head or bend down to open an umbrella, and one of its hands would touch you again.

In it, I saw a story about how the past never truly goes away. It merely steps aside to make room for the new, hides behind it, and then returns with some accidental movement. Now it seems to me that, in my very first niche fragrance, I immediately encountered Lutens’s central theme.

And it is not death, although enough has been written about death in relation to him. It is, rather, the impossibility and the unwillingness to lose anything completely. The past changes shape: it dries out, becomes candied, turns into resin, a photograph, a smell. And art attempts, with varying degrees of success, to build a vessel for it in which, for at least a little while, it will remain unchanged.

Lutens’s perfumes always tell stories. Often unhappy ones, and almost always complicated, even when the composition itself is very simple. But a dark story can also bring the joy of recognition: yes, this happened to me, yes, I remember this cold, this food, this room, yes, I thought I had lost it forever.

This is exactly what Lutens first did with the human face.

The face that will not decay

Lutens’s biography has been retold millions of times: a childhood without parents, the absence of a mother figure, war, loneliness, an early job in a hair salon. It fits his aesthetic so neatly that all you have to do is place Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde beside it, add a few words about trauma, and everything falls perfectly into place.

But I want to begin with a different detail. Lutens wanted to be an actor.

He never became an actor. Instead, over the following decades, he learned to turn other people into images: through hair, makeup, photography, and eventually perfume. Later, he subjected himself to the same process, until the man became almost inseparable from the figure he had constructed — dressed in black, hidden behind dark glasses, speaking from his house in Marrakesh in a voice that seemed to belong less to ordinary life than to a world entirely of his own making.

At fourteen, he was sent to work in a hair salon in Lille. There, he began styling hair and applying makeup, then photographing the resulting images. At twenty, he arrived in Paris with a folder of photographs and, quite literally, walked in off the street and into Vogue. He later worked with Dior, and in 1980 signed a contract with Shiseido.

For the next twenty years, Lutens created the Japanese corporation’s international image: he designed makeup and packaging, and shot advertising campaigns and films. He was literally making a face for Shiseido while simultaneously trying to understand whether he had one of his own.

“I don’t know what I am really, but by creating my own weapons and talking about them I provide them to you. Some people are going to recognise my fears. I do not want to be recognised or famous, I don’t really care about having my name in big letters, the point is to recognise who you are. All I’m talking about is identity – that is all I’ve been talking about my whole life.”

A strange statement from a man who would eventually build one of the most recognisable personal brands in perfumery. But Lutens is full of contradictions and entirely without inner peace. Life does not appear serene or luminous to him. He sees it as a movement towards death, and the world around him as a strange place inhabited by ghosts and mannequins. Living things change too easily: they age, disappear, betray their form. They cannot be trusted. And so form has to be created by hand.

Look at his photographs for Shiseido from the 1980s. The woman in the frame has no pores. There is no down on her skin, no lines around her lips, no stray strand of hair. Her hair lies as though it had not been styled but cast in a mould. The mouth is drawn in a single stroke; the eye is outlined until it ceases to be an eye and becomes the sign of an eye.

The cosmetics advertising we are used to says: this is still you, only better. Foundation looks like your own skin, only smoother; blush makes it seem as though you have simply been out for a healthy walk. Lutens conceals nothing. His woman is quite obviously painted. Cosmetics have not improved her face; they have replaced it with another object.

He said that he had invented one woman and then recreated her again and again. Not different women, not a range of personalities and ages, but a single form that could be endlessly altered and reproduced, never allowed to become a separate living person.

White makeup removes the skin; the black line removes chance; the red mouth removes speech.

What remains is a mask. And this is where Japan enters.

These images clearly evoke kabuki, Noh theatre, lacquer, calligraphy, and the emptiness surrounding the figure. But Lutens did not arrive in Japan out of nowhere, with no cultural baggage, see all of this, and suddenly become Lutens. White faces, the colour black, motionless women, and a love of artifice were already present in his work: old Hollywood, German Expressionism, Art Deco, and French Decadence.

Japan gave him a ready-made way to organise all of it. It gave him permission, as it were, to regard the mask not as a layer covering the true face, but as the final form. To make no pretence of naturalness and offer no apology for artifice.

In the Western imagination, there must always be a true self behind the mask, waiting to be discovered and set free. Lutens has spent decades saying that he is trying to understand himself, yet he almost never appears without a meticulously constructed persona.

The mask does not merely replace the face; it stops its movement. Inside it, you cannot sweat, grow old, smudge your lipstick, burst unexpectedly into laughter, or ruin the composition with a bad mood. It is neither alive nor dead. It is simply complete.

That is why the usual explanation of Lutens through death seems incomplete to me. There is certainly enough death in his work, but I see much more resistance to change. Makeup fixes the face in place, and photography fixes the makeup. Later, a bottle will hold a scent, a name will hold a memory, and a shop will hold an entire world.

He begins by doing this to that woman in the Shiseido advertisements. Then he starts doing the same thing with perfume.

Perfume gets a face too

“Perfume is nothing but molecules,” Lutens says.

Again, an odd thing to hear from a man who did everything possible to ensure that we would never perceive perfume as nothing but molecules.

In 1982, ten years before Féminité du Bois and the Palais-Royal salons, Shiseido released Nombre Noir, Lutens’s first perfume.

By now, it is impossible to clear away the legends surrounding it. Perfume folklore tells of enormous doses of damascones, expensive osmanthus, an unstable formula, leaking bottles, financial losses, destroyed batches and, most Japanese of all, the perfumer’s eventual suicide.

There is also a particularly Lutensian story: that the packaging’s black coating contributed to the perfume’s deterioration. In other words, the form became so important that it began to devour the substance.

The bottle was black and octagonal, alternating between matte and glossy surfaces. The name was meaningless and slightly strange. “Black Number” sounded like a code, an error in a calculation, or the title of a film.

In other words, Lutens gave those molecules a face before anything else.

Today, this is the standard structure of a niche brand. A fragrance arrives together with a visual system, an interior, a story, a Spotify playlist, and a distinctive shape for the cap. Everything must obey the same idea, even when the idea itself is fairly vague and/or primitive.

With Nombre Noir, this unity was not yet a familiar, confidently deployed technique. It looked like a dangerous experiment that might cost the company more than it earned.

And this is where it matters that Shiseido stood behind Lutens. Really stood behind him.

We love stories about solitary geniuses who believed in their vision so completely that no one could stop them. But in the real world, being an unstoppable genius is somehow not enough to produce an expensive, complicated, potentially unprofitable object. You also need laboratories, manufacturing, distribution, and someone willing to pay for it all.

For twenty years, Shiseido served as Lutens’s modern corporate patron: it did not ask him to make his ideas smaller, but gave them industrial scale.

Marrakesh would later give him his materials and much of his public mythology. But it was Japan that gave him the means to turn a private aesthetic obsession into an object that could be manufactured and distributed around the world.

The wood that stopped carrying the piano

Ten years later came Féminité du Bois.

To understand why this fragrance was so innovative and important, it is enough to recall the structure of classical perfume. The top notes are light and volatile; flowers sit in the middle, at the heart of the composition; and only in the base do you find woods, resins, musk, and balsams.

For a long time, wood was the stagehand. It carried the piano. It was not supposed to play it.

In Féminité du Bois, the stagehand sat down at the piano and began the concert.

Lutens connects the story of the fragrance with Marrakesh: carpentry workshops, the smell of cedar shavings, and a piece of wood he kept as a souvenir. The material here is clearly Moroccan.

But the way it is treated also echoes Japan, with its tradition of kōdō: incense is not simply smelled; people literally sit in a circle and “listen” to it together. A sliver of wood is not some background to the event. It is the event.

And in Féminité du Bois, cedar does not support the composition from below. It opens like a flower.

First come dry pencil shavings. Then dark plum, apricot, cinnamon, something warm and almost milky. Gradually, it becomes difficult to tell at what point the wood stopped being wood and became a body.

People usually say that Féminité du Bois made wood feminine.

As though, in his Shiseido photographs, Lutens had consistently transformed woman into material: a white surface, black lacquer, red pigment. Here, the material moves in the opposite direction and becomes a woman.

First, the woman becomes an object. Then the object becomes a woman. It sounds cold, but I have never experienced Féminité du Bois as a cold intellectual exercise. To me, it is a woodland fairy tale and the scent of an embrace, not about seduction at all, but about a body that has finally stopped defending itself.

Lutens took femininity beyond the boundaries of the female body and built another body for it: wooden, warm, comforting, and large enough to hide inside.

The woman did not disappear from the frame, but for the first time, she was allowed to leave it.

Morocco remains on the surface

When people talk about Lutens, Morocco is usually the first thing they mention: spices, cedar, honey, dried fruit, resins, fabrics, dust, dark rooms, and the house in Marrakesh. All of this really is his language. But the grammar of that language took shape during his work with Shiseido.

As I have already said, Morocco gave Lutens his materials, while Japan gave him a way to organise them: isolation, repetition, precision, surface, vessel, and ritual. Morocco therefore remained visible, while Japan moved inside the construction.

Colour followed the same pattern, incidentally. In the Shiseido advertisements, it was visible: a white face, a black line, a red or purple mouth. Lutens’s bottles are very minimalist, almost monastic, but colour did not disappear. It simply moved into the scent.

Sarrasins is purple, almost black. La Fille de Berlin is red, metallic, and covered in thorns. Arabie is a bazaar seen from inside a sack of spices.

And Ambre Sultan is brown-gold.

At first, it smells of dried herbs, bay leaves, resin, and dust. As though someone had opened an old wooden cupboard where medicinal herbs and incense had been stored, then warmed all of it with the heat of skin. Gradually, the resins grow thicker, the vanilla darker, and the fragrance becomes both sacred and bodily at once.

Not pure incense, but not simply warm skin either. A body turning itself into an incense burner.

The photography ended, in other words, but the way of handling colour remained.

The mask with horns

But there is also a point at which my neat theory of the white face and Japanese form begins to crack.

Because Lutens has Muscs Koublaï Khan: honey, musk, sweat, and fur, an outright zoo, and to some people even the smell of a homeless man. There is also Miel de Bois, in which honey is poured over a dry plank and, at the same time, rather distinctly recalls the smell of a not particularly clean public toilet.

Where is the white face here? Where are the control, the emptiness, and the Japanese purity?

One could point out that Noh theatre has more than smooth female masks. There is also the hannya: a female demon with horns, bared teeth, and metallic eyes. In that case, Muscs Koublaï Khan is a mask too, only an animal one.

I like this version, but I am not sure I need to use it to rescue the entire argument. Perhaps the Japanese line really does fail to align with the Moroccan one, which is bodily and excessive. They do not resolve into a neat system, and that may be precisely why Lutens remains a living artist rather than a textbook illustration of his own aesthetic.

But still. I like thinking about it this way. Because even dirt looks carefully staged in Lutens’s work. This is not a living body caught unawares. The sweat has been arranged, the fur has been groomed, and the animal knows where to stand and when to enter the stage.

The mask is still in place. Sometimes it is white; sometimes it comes with fur and horns.

What his brand never offers is the promise: this is still you, only slightly better.

Not rot, but jam

Jeux de Peau smells of toasted bread crust, hot milk, and butter. Yet for some reason, these notes do not add up to the same association for everyone. Whenever I ask people about it, the fragrance finds each person’s own favourite pastry or grain-based food from childhood and reproduces that exact thing.

For me, it is buckwheat with milk.

Somehow, the bread, milk, and sandalwood arrange themselves into precisely that. The recognition is instantaneous. Not “this reminds me of buckwheat,” but suddenly that exact bowl of childhood breakfast, that same warm milky smell, everyone you love still alive, nothing bad having happened yet.

Even bread, in Lutens’s world, exists not in the kitchen but inside a memory. You cannot return there, but there it will never go stale again.

Almost everything in his work is built this way. His perfumes contain many things that seem just about to spoil: flowers on the verge of wilting, smoke, dust, camphor, honey that has become almost bodily, overripe fruit. But when you look more closely, this is more often preservation than decay.

His plum has not just been picked from the tree. It has been dried, cooked, or steeped in spices. A flower is turned into honey or an infusion, wood into resin, skin into cured leather, vanilla into a dark balm.

Lutens does not trust freshness. Freshness is too brief an interval before a thing begins, inevitably, to change and deteriorate. That is why his characters have usually already undergone some kind of treatment: drying, smoking, infusing, candying. Now one can at least hope they will remain this way.

That is why, to me, Lutens is not an aesthete of decay, but the greatest jam-maker in the world.

Only instead of a jar, he has a bell jar, and instead of a grandmother’s cellar, a shop in the Palais-Royal.

The shop you had to reach

About the shop. In 1992, Les Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido opened.

It was not a brightly lit perfume boutique on a shopping street, but a dark space beneath the arcades of the Palais-Royal, somewhere you went deliberately. The journey to the shop was already part of the experience: casually dropping in for perfume between coffee and shopping was not really an option.

I, for example, am ashamed to admit that despite all my visits to Paris, I never made it there.

But I do own a bell jar, Bas de Soie, and it happens to be one of my most intimate perfumes. Cold iris, green natural hyacinth, cool silk, something almost weightless. The bottle itself, however, does not look intimate at all. It is heavy, ceremonial, and demands a ritual: open the massive stopper, apply the perfume, close everything again.

Each time, the stopper reminds you that inside is a volatile liquid which this entire heavy object is straining to contain. The bottle does not help you to use the perfume, but it does make you take care of it.

This fits neatly with the way Lutens himself speaks about perfumery. To him, perfume has always been a weapon: not something merely to wear, but something to use, turning weakness into strength. It protects, reinforces the inner self, settles over the body like armour. And armour is not something you put on automatically every morning for work, or to make groceries. Lutens does not believe perfume should be an ordinary, accessible product to be consumed without thought.

Hence the shop that had to be found, the limited collection, the sales assistants acting as guides, the bottles that demanded ritual. Inaccessibility was not a marketing layer added on top of the perfume. It was part of the very idea of what perfume ought to be.

You must choose the weapon, lift it, feel its weight, open it carefully. And then apply Bas de Soie to the skin… to smell a perfume that has no intention of killing anyone and smells of something utterly defenceless.

When a personal code becomes a DIY kit

For Lutens all of this was deeply personal.

White faces, black accents, Marrakesh, strange names, scents that resist you at first. His own profile behind black glasses. The individual elements had existed before, of course, but together they formed an entirely coherent world that belonged unmistakably to one person.

But the big problem with any powerful aesthetic is that sooner or later other people understand how it works and break it down into its component parts. Then it becomes a school, and later a ready-made set of tricks.

Today, a new perfume brand can speak this language of an ancient secret society from day one. The main thing is to acquire the founder’s childhood trauma early, along with a manifesto about memory, photographs of a concrete wall, and a fragrance called something like Ashes of an Unfinished Letter. Just recently, I walked into a perfume shop and was told about a new brand exactly like this. Its founder is eccentric, he draws on his childhood, he chose some obscure word as the brand name, and so on and so forth.

But the thing about Lutens is that he was not inventing templates. But his system was so personal and so consistent even in its inconsistencies that it became possible to turn it into a template.

This is one of the clearest signs of influence. People begin copying a person or a brand not at the level of specific objects, but at the level of how meaning itself is formed.

And where is the perfumer in all this?

“The best perfume-maker was the wind, rivers and pollens,” Lutens says.

Do you remember how, only a few paragraphs ago, perfume was nothing but molecules?

But if you think about it, that is more or less how it works. On one side, there is nature, memory, wind, and an almost mystical sense of recognition. On the other, formulas, laboratories, manufacturing, and people who know how to turn an image into a functioning fragrance.

Lutens could make a photograph almost entirely by himself: conceive the image, apply the makeup, style the hair, set the lighting, take the picture. Perfume did not work that way. The formulas were created by professional perfumers: Jean-Yves Leroy, Pierre Bourdon, Maurice Roucel, and above all Christopher Sheldrake, whose long collaboration with Lutens shaped the house.

But what matters is that, inside the brand, all these people begin to speak in Lutens’s voice.

Frédéric Malle will later build the opposite system: the perfumer’s name appears on the cover, and the brand resembles a library of different authors. With Serge Lutens, everything looks like one long theatrical production, the playwright, composer, set designer, and actors are all there somewhere, but there is always only one name on the poster. His direction became so total that everyone else dissolved into it. The actor who was once denied a stage eventually built a theatre in which everyone worked to support his leading role.

Six seasons in a row

The theatre had an extraordinary repertoire.

In 2000, when Serge Lutens became a separate brand, Lutens and Sheldrake began releasing perfumes with a frequency that is still difficult to believe.

I will simply list them:

2000: Arabie. À la nuit. Sa majesté la rose. Douce Amère.
2001: Datura Noir. Chergui. Santal Blanc.
2002: Vétiver Oriental.
2003: Fumerie Turque. Clair de Musc. Un bois vanille.
2004: Fleurs de citronnier. Chêne. Daim Blond.
2005: Bornéo 1834. Cèdre. Miel de bois.

Seventeen (!) fragrances in six (!!!) years.

And that is without counting the earlier Ambre Sultan, Fleurs d’Oranger, Muscs Koublaï Khan, Rahät Loukoum, and Tubéreuse Criminelle.

You could remove everything that came before and after from the Lutens line, leave only this list, and it would still remain one of the most important catalogues in modern niche perfumery.

Of course, not every fragrance in this list is flawless. Some are great and some are good, some successful and some debatable, and debating them is something we all enjoy enormously. What is astonishing is how many different solutions one art director–perfumer partnership managed to present within such a tiny span of time.

It is quite literally a repertory theatre that, over six seasons, staged a tragedy, a farce, a chamber drama, an Eastern fairy tale, a one-man play, and something so experimental that half the audience left during the interval.

We have already discussed the tuberose from the prologue: in Tubéreuse Criminelle, the flower played something cold, camphoraceous, almost medicinal. In Cèdre, they returned to it and concealed it inside wood. The tuberose emerged through the cedar, creamy, alive, slightly dangerous. A prima donna cast in a supporting role who treacherously stole the whole performance anyway.

In À la nuit the jasmine expands until it becomes an environment, an entire southern summer night: humid air, very dark greenery, white petals, animal warmth. You do not so much smell it as spend some time inside it.

And Arabie, the fragrance with which all of this began for me, answered a question perfumery had not yet had time to ask. Dried fruit, spices, and dense woody notes can very easily collapse into a sticky, sweet mush. In Arabie all this Eastern abundance is organised as a space. It is overcrowded, noisy, and sometimes makes it difficult to breathe, yet movement is constantly preserved within the excess. Some elements come forward, others disappear, and still others return several hours later. After Arabie, dried fruit can no longer be treated as an innocent variation on sweetness. Every new fragrance in this vein has to answer the question of what it does differently.

The same goes for their gourmands — Rahät Loukoum, Datura Noir, and later Jeux de Peau. Food is always connected to something else: the body, childhood, safety, excess. We have already discussed the bread that, for me, turned into buckwheat with milk and will never go stale again. Gourmand scents do not try to depict food; they activate a memory of it instead. This is why the same fragrance returns different people to different kitchens in different countries and childhoods.

Other materials they freed from their familiar cultural scenery.

In Bornéo 1834, patchouli and chocolate refuse to play the roles expected of them. The chocolate is not a dessert, and the patchouli is not damp hippie soil. Together they form a dry, bitter, almost mineral structure and smell slightly like shavings from coloured pencils. A few years later, Sheldrake would perfect this pairing in Coromandel, and a Lutens-esque oddity would become one of the industry’s reference points.

So in short, they entered almost every existing genre and, in each one, moved a wall slightly outward. Of course, it is still possible to make a rose, a tuberose, a tobacco, a vanilla, or a dried-fruit fragrance. But it is no longer an axiom that the roles of these materials and notes are clearly defined once and for all.

At the same time, their innovation is something that is so easy to miss. If we continue the theatrical analogy, Lutens’s fragrances do not resemble productions on a grand stage, with loud declamation, elaborate scenery, and sweeping movements visible from the back row. No, they are closer to chamber theatre, where the audience sits right beside the actors, and the meaning has to be found in a pause held a bit too long or an intonation that is just slightly wrong.

Perfume often works the same way. We look for the main hook: what the fragrance is famous for, why we are supposed to remember it. We want the first five minutes to provide enough evidence of greatness, or at least enough evidence that it deserves our attention.

With Sheldrake, the important things happen elsewhere. His most nuanced work lies in making familiar materials behave in unexpected ways, subtly shifting their place and function within the composition. As a result, these compositions are difficult to copy literally, because too much depends on internal tension and precise balance. But the approach itself can be borrowed.

Also, back to everyone’s favourite subject: reformulations. Materials have changed, and some formulas have too. Some fragrances now smell drier, quieter, louder, or rougher than they once did. But the best of them do not depend solely on the raw materials of their era, because they depend much more on the writing and the direction.

And good writing and good direction age more slowly than the scenery.

The last actor is you

The theatre, however, does not end with the perfumers.

Some perfumes adapt themselves to the wearer. That is exactly how they are advertised: they will unfold in a unique way on your skin, become your personal scent. The promise is still the same, once again: you will remain yourself, only slightly more convincing (or better).

Lutens does not work that way.

His fragrances come to you with a role already prepared and hand it to you together with the costume.

Once you put on Ambre Sultan, it is impossible to remain, for the rest of the day, simply a person who has gone to the pharmacy and the post office. Even if that is exactly where you went. The dry herbs and resin will demand, at the very least, a different posture and a different pace.

Muscs Koublaï Khan has to be held like a pause onstage, while you wait, knowing that the audience has not yet understood what is happening.

And the first ten minutes of Tubéreuse Criminelle are simply pure acting: you already know what comes next, while everyone around you does not, and the important thing is not to break character and start explaining yourself.

And here the mask returns once again, for the final time.

In Noh theatre, the mask is motionless. The actor creates the expression with the rest of the body. The same piece of wood can appear sorrowful or laughing, and the difference comes not from the mask, but from the person wearing it.

Lutens’s perfumes work in the same way. The fragrance is fixed, complete, and has no intention of adapting itself to you. But it provides only the form, and you are the one who has to perform inside it.

Many perfumes ask who you are. Lutens uncompromisingly tells you whom you are playing today.

I think this is where the strange feeling so many people describe as “this is too much for me” or “I have not grown into it yet” comes from. It is not that the fragrance possesses some special unfathomable complexity. It is simply that, for the first time in a long while, you have been given a role rather than a mirror.

Some people refuse it. Others accept, and sometimes discover that performing can, in fact, be fun.

The artist becomes his own museum

In 2015, Shiseido announced that it had acquired the Serge Lutens trademark.

A man who had spent his entire life talking about identity had created one so convincing that it eventually became not only a language others began to speak, but a corporate asset. The circle closed not metaphorically, but legally.

But this story cannot be reduced to a corporation first using an artist and then buying his name. Without Shiseido, there would have been no international Lutens, no Nombre Noir, and no possibility of producing complex and expensive ideas for decades when they did not always promise an immediate commercial return. It was his employer, patron, manufacturer, and eventually his owner and archivist.

Gradually, the later brand begins preserving not a particular face, scent, or memory, but Lutens himself. It brings back old perfumes, moves them between lines and bottles, repeats familiar forms, and retells stories we have heard many times before.

The artist became a museum bearing his own name. And a museum, as we know, must not only preserve its collection, but also sell tickets.

And souvenirs.

A brand that once described perfume as a weapon and did not particularly approve of its overly everyday use eventually begins releasing home fragrances. One of them smells like a linen wardrobe.

You could see this as a betrayal of its ideals. Or maybe the museum has simply begun selling the artist’s entire world.

Including the wardrobe.

They don’t make them like this anymore

It is customary to grumble about late Lutens. The old man sits in Marrakesh and keeps releasing the same thing. Roses, dried fruit, resins, something dark again, another mysterious title whose words could be rearranged in any order without changing much. Nothing new, no development. Where is the spirit of the age, where is the engagement with the present, where is even an attempt to surprise us?

This is fair. The later works really can be repetitive, and some amount to quotations from his own past. But the complaint itself is funny. It assumes that keeping up with the times is an obligation.

Lutens never worked with the spirit of the age. On the contrary, he worked against it. His entire system is built around resistance to change. Demanding novelty from him is about as sensible as demanding fresh fruit from a jar of jam.

And still, people grumble. I grumble too.

Then I remember that he is eighty-four. And I know perfectly well that one day I will open my feed, see the news… and the same people who wrote, “The same thing again, how much longer can this go on?” will write long, beautiful posts about how great he was.

We always do this.

Good perfumes will not disappear, I’m 100% sure there will be plenty of others. But nothing quite like this.

What will end with him is the scale of ambition: one person spending forty years building an entire world from a single obsession, and a corporation giving that world industrial scale.

They no longer make figures of this magnitude. And this is where his own system fails for the first time. A perfume can be stocked up on, decanted, hidden away, saved for special occasions, sealed inside glass beneath a heavy stopper.

You cannot stockpile the artist.

Under glass

Several years ago, I watched a perfume die.

It was a vintage Femme Rochas. On a blotter, the fragrance spent several hours burning with something scorched and ruined, and then suddenly began releasing sweet fruit, flowers, and spices, as though the damaged formula had remembered for a few minutes what it used to be.

Collectors like to call old bottles time capsules. But of course they are nothing of the sort. Time (and air) is sealed inside with the perfume and continues doing its work.

That is why early Lutens still feels so magical. You can sense the risk that the form might crack under the weight of its own ambition. Nombre Noir deteriorates and, instead of a clear history, leaves behind a tangle of legends; in Féminité du Bois, cedar occupies more space than the rules had assigned it; Tubéreuse Criminelle greets you with gasoline and only then allows you near the flower. Even the shop has to be found, while the heavy bottle demands a ceremony rather than helping you apply perfume quickly.

Later, all of this becomes a code. The things that once prevented the product from behaving like a normal, appealing product become its commercial advantage.

All his life, Lutens built masks and vessels for things that cannot be preserved. But we all know that white makeup will not stop ageing, and a photograph will not bring the woman back. Perfume will spoil because a bottle cannot entirely prevent evaporation, and it will not return us to a carefree childhood with a bowl of buckwheat for breakfast.

Glass saves nothing. But it gives disappearance a beautiful form.

And this is precisely what Lutens left to niche perfumery. Not merely the black bottle, the strange smell, or the founder in black glasses, but the idea of perfume as an entire world whose rules we willingly accept.

We endure the gasoline before the tuberose, search for the inconspicuous door, carefully open the heavy bottle, tighten the stopper, and step onto the stage in the role we have been given.

As though this time it might work.

— There’s some package for you. A small one.

— Probably from work. They were sending us gifts, I chose a watch strap.

— It doesn’t look like a watch strap.

— We aren’t expecting anything else.

I was typing something intently and answering without looking. My husband stood there with the package in his hands and conscientiously reported the situation to me as it unfolded, while I, with the complete confidence of a person in possession of the facts, explained to him that we hadn’t ordered anything.

— It says Guerlain here.

He handed it to me. I saw beige cardboard with dark speckles and the letters G. Coffee beans. Guerlain packaged things this way from the early sixties until sixty-seven. Then came the black-and-white zigzags, then then batch codes appeared, and dating became precise. Before that, everything was by boxes and the markings on the bottom.

Inside was Vol de Nuit. Extrait. The umbrella bottle. If you turn it upside down, it becomes a little circus: the dome at the bottom, the neck in place of the mast. The condition is such that you want to speak in a whisper. A little over a hundred dollars on Japanese eBay. For a specimen like this, that isn’t a price. I don’t remember buying it. At all.

What if we go home?

On the third of July, we had the premiere of the film about the Chișinău circus. Four years ago, we were living in Vilnius. There was a war. I came across a photograph on Facebook of the bus stop near the house where I grew up. I showed the photograph to my husband and said:

— What if we go home?

And we went.

My husband was slowly putting himself back together; the war had taken away his homeland and his work in a single day. And I said: make a film about our circus. Not about the collapsed ceiling and the unique building of Soviet Brutalism — tonnes of that had already been filmed. About sawdust and popcorn, about flying beneath the dome, about the sweet and frightening way your heart stopped when the lights went out. About laughter — kind, tender, childlike.

At some point he posted several photographs, and hundreds of people responded. Literally hundreds, I am not exaggerating. And every one of them told their own story — kind, tender, childlike. People brought photographs, old posters, stories, grievances, favourite quotations. It became clear fairly quickly that it was impossible to make a film about the circus that was only about the circus.

On the third of July, we showed the film in the courtyard of the National Museum of History of Moldova. More than five hundred people came. Chișinău sat beneath the open sky and watched a film about itself. A phrase spoken in a kitchen in another country had somehow made it all the way there.

We came home completely destroyed. Opened a bottle of wine, drank a glass each. My husband said, “I’ll cut some cheese.” He didn’t make it to the kitchen, sat down on the sofa and slept until morning. I don’t remember anything either. Not how I gave up waiting for the cheese, not how I decided to distract myself and look at eBay, not how I came across Vol de Nuit at all and pressed the “buy” button.

The perfume I didn’t love

And now the funniest thing: I never loved Vol de Nuit.

Several years ago, I wrote a post about it in which I called it my least favourite classic Guerlain. It was a great disappointment to me because I never understood what the author wanted to say. It infuriated me that the opening was brilliant and then everything deflated. This is what I wrote about the opening then: “bitter, sharp, juicy, green... you feel like an infinitely happy horse with its muzzle in a spring meadow after a long winter in the stable.”

I still think this is the best thing I have written about galbanum, and at the time it seemed to me that Jacques Guerlain lost his nerve a little after that. Irises, narcissus… and down into vanilla-sandalwood sweetness. “As though he had been thinking of making the perfume a chypre, changed his mind on the way and went into a woody oriental, fatal passions.”

Fourteen years later, Germaine Cellier would take exactly this razor-edged galbanum for Vent Vert, and an entire direction of green chypres would grow out of it. That is, Guerlain had the idea first, but he did not dare carry it through to the end because it was too unlike himself.

But taste changes without asking and does not send you an updated version of your personality for approval. One day you simply discover that everything has already changed.

In my case — literally. My hand ordered the perfume that my head did not love, on an evening my head remembers nothing about.

Two darknesses

Vol de Nuit came out in 1933. Saint-Exupéry’s novel — two years earlier. Jacques Guerlain read the book, and something struck him so deeply that instead of yet another garden, flower or woman, he decided to dedicate a perfume to a night flight.

I like the gesture itself.

One person writes a book about pilots carrying other people’s mail through the darkness. Another reads it and responds with a smell.

So, I used to think that Guerlain lost his nerve after the galbanum, but now I think: perhaps he simply returned?

There are two darknesses in Vol de Nuit. The first is cold, piercing. The open door of a hangar, night at altitude, air cutting into your face. The earth has disappeared, nothing can be seen ahead, all that remains is to keep gaining altitude. Then the perfume descends: iris, narcissus, moss, sandalwood, vanilla. And another darkness begins — warm, woody, almost domestic. The night of a room where one dim lamp is burning and someone has not yet gone to bed.

One darkness replaces the other. This, in my view, is very Guerlain: to fly upwards, as high as you possibly can, see the cold stars, and still return the aeroplane to vanilla and sandalwood.

Three books about responsibility

I have a separate relationship with Saint-Exupéry.

I stopped loving The Little Prince at the same time I learned how to leave. As a child, it seemed like a book about love and loyalty. Now I see a fairly toxic story about why you must tolerate someone who hurts you. And then the fox comes along and delivers the basic basics for half the toxic relationships of the twentieth century: you are forever responsible for everyone you have tamed. Not great for a children’s book.

But Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes) remains my favourite. Especially the ending; I can quote it almost by heart: a third-class railway carriage, Polish workers being expelled from France, compressed by life into lumps of clay, and among them a sleeping child with an impossibly beautiful face, the infant Mozart. But he is being carried to the same place, beneath the same stamping press.

Exupéry writes that it is not poverty itself that torments him. Something else is more frightening: in each of these people, perhaps, a Mozart has been killed. Talent and the possibility of becoming someone are methodically destroyed by work, exhaustion, circumstances, the absence of space in which a person might unfold.

Everyone admires the way Exupéry wrote this. And they are right to admire it.

But not everyone knows that a couple of decades later a clown came along and carried his thought to its conclusion:

We will return to the clown.

Finally, Night Flight is a book about how the mail must get through. There is Rivière, the director of the air-mail network; he knows neither sentiment nor fatigue, and every day he sends people into the darkness. Rivière is not a villain. He believes in a cause greater than the individual, knows the price of flight and still believes that the price of inaction is higher.

And there is the pilot Fabien, who gets caught in a cyclone over Patagonia. Landing the plane is impossible. So he begins gaining altitude and rises to the very highest point, above the clouds, into a completely endless starry sky. The beauty is incredible; there is no fuel for the way back.

Fabien does not return. In the morning, Rivière sends out the next aeroplane.

The lowest genre

I once wrote in my old LiveJournal posts: the circus is largely about how people fight gravity and then come out to take a bow anyway. When I gave my speech at the premiere, this comparison came back to me.

The circus is simply literally built this way: most often, a person leaves the ground, stays up there for a while, does something incredible, and then comes down, wipes their hands on their thigh and bows. The audience exhales.

Ever since childhood, I have hated hearing the circus called low art. Especially clowns. The clown is often the most professional person in the circus. He must know how to move, fall, control his body, hear the music, hold a pause, see his partner, feel the audience and react instantly if the act goes wrong. But the clown is conventionally regarded as a low genre within an art that is itself already considered low. He is supposedly there to fill the pauses while the props are being changed for the real performers.

Western culture has plenty of sad clowns. Usually it is the same plot: the performance has ended, the spectators have gone home, the clown has been left alone, and now it becomes clear that he himself does not find it funny at all. This is sadness for oneself.

In the USSR, there was a clown of a completely different kind, Leonid Yengibarov. He was sad for others. The closest thing to him is probably Fellini with his philosopher on the tightrope in La strada.

Here is Yengibarov walking out onto the tightrope.

The rope is lying on the floor. See for yourself.

Leonid Yengibarov, “On the Tightrope”

When we began making the film, the clown immediately took charge of the philosophical part. Sasha Cojuhari. We have this entire line: Exupéry, Yengibarov, Fellini, the murdered Mozart, and it came from him. Sasha once said that Fellini dreamed of becoming a clown, but it was too difficult a profession, so he had to become a director. That is the hierarchy of the arts.

Do not trim the fountain

I read Yengibarov’s novellas when I was at school. They are not even stories; more often they are half a page, sometimes a page, rarely two. In that amount of space, an author usually only has time to establish the exposition. Yengibarov managed to build a world, overturn it and leave while you were still wondering whether you were supposed to laugh or cry.

In one novella, a man comes to a park with enormous scissors and trims the jets of the fountains. The water immediately returns to its place. He does it to show people: not everything in the world can be cut. Especially not with the same comb.

It seems to me that this is the entire essence of the clown: the world is constantly trimming someone to fit — a profession, propriety, the market, the state, an idea of a normal person. And the clown comes out with scissors to the fountain and shows how idiotic the very idea looks.

In another novella, first a man kisses a girl beneath a tree beside a river. Only afterwards do tribes, states, Olympic Games, wars, Auschwitz, freedom, geniuses, worlds and the entire rest of human history appear.

We constantly treat the large-scale as primary and the person as a particular case. Yengibarov puts everything back in its proper order: first one person reached towards another, and everything else came afterwards.

And it was he who answered Exupéry: do not hurt a person — perhaps they are Mozart and have not yet managed to write anything. Do not wait for proof of genius, do not rush to trim, break and explain their place to a person. Especially if they cannot yet prove in any way that they deserve mercy.

He also has a novella about a circus performer who spends a long time learning a handstand: his shoulders hurt, his wrists swell, his eyes fill with blood. Then he slowly lifts his second hand from the floor and realises that he is holding the globe on his remaining palm.

This is where the clown and the pilot meet. Fabien raises the aeroplane above the cyclone and finds himself among impossible stars. The acrobat raises the Earth on his palm. The pilot carries the mail. The clown carries us ourselves.

Self-portrait under someone else’s name

Yengibarov died at thirty-seven, of a ruptured heart, in July of seventy-two. A few weeks later, the Soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky wrote the poem “To Yengibarov — From the Audience.”

I read this poem aloud in acting classes about fifteen years ago.

It contains the main lines:

He did nothing funny,

He took our sorrow upon himself.

This is the difference between the ordinary sad clown and Yengibarov’s clown: the first suffers when the spectators leave, the second — because they came. The audience places its sorrow on a person’s shoulders, laughs a little, cries a little and goes home feeling lighter.

Vysotsky wrote this about Yengibarov, but in essence it was partly a self-portrait. He himself lived another eight years in roughly the same way: his own sorrow, other people’s sorrow, a guitar, his own voice, other people’s voices, one more hall, one more entrance. The poem turned out to be night mail: he sent it to Yengibarov, and eight years later it returned to the sender.

At the end, Vysotsky admits that he invented the cap for Yengibarov himself: the real clown performed without one. And it is true, after death the production of symbols begins. We try to determine who he was, what he meant, which phrase or meaning of his life should be considered the main one. In essence — we draw in the cap.

The bow

In February, Sasha performed his one-man show. He was taken from the stage to hospital. In May, he was gone. He did not live to see the third of July. The circus is no kinder than night mail: a person rises upwards, sometimes does not come back down, and the audience does not always have time to applaud. We did not have to invent him entirely after his death, to draw in the cap. He had time to explain who he was himself, to quote Exupéry and Yengibarov, to joke about Fellini, to formulate the entire structure of the circus profession.

After a person dies, all that remains is to do the same thing Rivière does: send out the next aeroplane in the morning. Edit the film, prepare the event, gather people, give them a beautiful summer evening and a little return to childhood. This is not a victory over death. Art does not defeat anything at all. It cannot resurrects, it does not return time, it does not deliver applause to where a person is still capable of hearing it.

It simply does not allow a person to be completely turned into a date, a photograph and a correct speech. Sasha is in the film — alive, speaking, with an ironic squint, with this Mozart of his.

On the third of July, more than five hundred people applauded him. He did not hear it, but the bow took place anyway.

A room where someone was recently

Briefly about the smell now, because after all that, analysing the pyramid feels slightly indecent.

The first minutes — cold and green, that same meadow, a hangar at four in the morning. Then it grows warmer: iris, powder, a strange narcissus that always seems slightly spoiled — exactly like a living one.

Then everything goes downwards — moss, sandalwood, vanilla and that warm animal thing we all love so much in vintages.

After three hours or so, it is no longer a composition but a material. Wood, dust, warm skin. It smells not like a person, but like a room where a person was recently.

The bottle stands on my shelf. Sixty years old, an inverted circus dome, coffee beans.

It made it.

On July 21, Substack CEO introduced a new word: Claudefishing. It is what happens when you read a text, give it your attention, and discover that there is nobody at the other end, the text was generated by AI. He titled his piece “Against Claudefishing.” That is why mine is called this.

The Substack Post

Against Claudefishing

It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet…

Read more

a month ago · 6743 likes · 1656 comments · Chris Best

The solution he proposes is a button. You press it and receive three percentages: how much was probably written by a human, how much by a human using a machine, and how much was generated entirely by a machine. The analysis comes from Pangram, an AI-text detector.

But what does the button actually measure?

The problem Chris described is the absence of a person. What Pangram attempts to detect is the presence of a tool. If you think about it, these are orthogonal things.

And once you notice that, the question of the detector becomes uninteresting. In its place, another and much more difficult question opens up: if the author is not necessarily the person who physically produced the object, then who is the author, and where exactly are they located?

Perfume has been answering this question for more than a century.

The instrument

A gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer. You feed it a sample of a perfume and receive a map of its volatile components: peaks, substances, relative proportions. Here is oakmoss. Here is peach lactone. Here is bergamot. Here is a jasmine base.

Let me say this immediately, so I do not look like a Luddite in your eyes: this instrument changed perfumery more profoundly than any individual perfumer ever did. It makes it possible to clone successful launches, reformulate perfumes around one new IFRA restriction after another, identify counterfeits, and reconstruct discontinued scents. It is incredibly precise at measuring what it is capable of measuring.

It can measure composition.

But composition is not authorship.

A chromatograph cannot distinguish Mitsouko from an extremely diligent reconstruction of Mitsouko. Similar peaks, similar proportions. But one bottle is Jacques Guerlain in 1919, with Farrer’s novel in his head: a woman silently waiting for the outcome of a battle that will determine the fate of two men at once, her husband and the man she loves. The other is: “Let’s make a copy of Mitsouko and present it as an innovative project”.

To the instrument, they are very similar. To perfume enthusiasts, they are not. And the difference will not be found in the materials used.

Since we are talking about materials, countless lances have been broken in the industry’s debate over natural ingredients versus synthetics. As though something depended on it.

It does not.

Perfumery is equally capable of producing magnificent and terrible things from either kind of material. I could not care less where a molecule came from if the result is good.

So this is not a column defending synthetics, nor is it another round in that war. Quite the opposite: that war and the current argument about AI on Substack are the same mistake. In both cases, the origin of the raw material is mistaken for a property of the work.

But authorship is not an ingredient. So where is it, then? I have at least four propositions about this. None of them is chemical.

Number Five

According to the best-known version of the story, Ernest Beaux brought Coco Chanel two numbered series of samples: numbers one through five, and numbers twenty through twenty-four.

She chose number five. We still know its number. Nobody remembers the others.

But besides the samples that reached Chanel, there were also modifications that Beaux decided not to show her at all, discarded because they were too conventional, too heavy, too banal, or simply not right, and therefore never left the laboratory.

A chromatograph can tell you what Chanel No. 5 is composed of. It will not be able to find the other samples he threw away before the meeting. Nor the moment in time when Chanel said, “this one”.

But the act of authorship, perhaps, took place at that very moment.

We tend to think of the author as the person who physically produced the material: who wrote the words, made the formula, mixed the paint, laid the bricks. Some creative work unfolds in very different ways. It needs someone to set a vision, another to identify possible paths, someone to spot the right one. One person to say “no” 99 times, then someone to notice the 100th.

None of those microdoubts or microdecisions make it to the surface of the completed work.

That is my first hypothesis: an author is someone who chooses. And choice is invisible in the final product.

Between Lutens and Sheldrake

My second proposition is potentially even more unsettling. The authorship has outgrown the single person.

Christopher Sheldrake and Serge Lutens worked together for more than thirty years. Lutens’s name appeared on his bottles. Sheldrake created the formulas, sometimes together with other perfumers.

This is never clearer, perhaps, than with their debut scent, Féminité du bois. Lutens was the creative director of Shiseido at the time, and for years had dreamed of bottling cedar, the aroma of freshly felled wood he remembered from his childhood in Marrakech. Shiseido gave the project to Pierre Bourdon.

Bourdon drafted a beautiful dry construction of cedar with plum and apricot. The formula then migrated to his colleague, Christopher Sheldrake, who refined and developed it in collaboration with Lutens, creating a version that was darker, greener, drier, more translucent.

The bottle was designed by Lutens. On the bottle, it said Shiseido.

Who is the author of Féminité du bois?

One could argue it’s Bourdon: the initial accord was his genius move. Or maybe it’s Sheldrake: an accord isn’t a fragrance, and he polished and perfected it into one we adore.

But it also must be Lutens, whose vision of cedar, whose insistent “No, not enough trees, I want more forest!”, sparked and guided the whole thing. All of them can say, yes, it was me.

And then it becomes even more interesting. Lutens and Sheldrake worked together using the same fundamental accord as the starting point for other perfumes over 17 years: Bois de violette, Bois et fruits, Bois et musc and Bois oriental — this time without Bourdon. Seventeen years later, Féminité du bois moved into Lutens’s own brand and appeared on a shelf under his name.

So an accord invented by one person was developed by two others, multiplied without the first, launched under a corporation’s name, and eventually signed with the name of the third.

Now try expressing that in percentages.

And yet neither Lutens with other perfumers nor Sheldrake with other art directors ever produced exactly the same world. Lutens without Sheldrake remains Lutens. Sheldrake without Lutens remains a great perfumer. But the dark, frightening and seductive universe they built over thirty years existed specifically between them.

Something very similar seems to be occurring right now with Marc-Antoine Barrois and Quentin Bisch. Barrois can offer worlds, imagery and the emotional backdrop against which the fragrance will live. Bisch can then translate those into scent.

The entire line up of creations from Barrois’s house is born from their ongoing dialogue.

Barrois could work with dozens of other perfumers. Bisch works for many other brands. But Ganymede, B683, Encelade, Tilia and Aldebaran form a language of their own, one that cannot be found in its entirety either in Barrois’s other projects or in Bisch’s other work.

That language is not always close to me. Sometimes my nose struggles to tolerate it. But it is impossible to deny that it is new, coherent and instantly recognisable.

So who is the author of Ganymede?

I think the answer is both of them. But not fifty per cent each, and not because each person placed his half inside the bottle. Their partnership is not the sum of two contributions. It is a creative symbiosis that produces a result neither of them could achieve alone.

Maybe Barrois and Bisch are the Lutens and Sheldrake of our time. Who knows. In both cases, the primary author turns out to be the relationship between two people.

Why a perfumer needs an art director

There are brands where the question of authorship appears simpler.

Marc-Antoine Corticchiato creates the perfumes of Parfum d’Empire himself and decides what his house will be. Liz Moores does the same for Papillon, Hiram Green for his eponymous brand, and Andy Tauer for Tauer. Here, the perfumer is simultaneously the art director, editor-in-chief and face of the brand.

Such houses can be beautiful and successful, but there are surprisingly few of them.

Maybe that is because composing a scent and understanding which scents should exist within the same world are not the same skill. A perfumer may create a magnificent formula, but that does not mean they know how to build a business. Someone still has to decide which good formula should be released, which perfumes belong beside one another, what belongs to this brand and what — however beautiful in itself — would destroy its language.

What to call it. How to present it. How to sell it. When to stop.

Corticchiato, Moores, Green, Tauer and the other, relatively rare, successful examples seem to me proof of how unusual it is to find a person capable of doing both jobs.

That leads to my third proposition: even an “auteur house” does not mean one person made everything with their own hands. It means one person had the final word.

Who gets the name

The fourth hypothesis is not even about creativity. It is about convention.

Tom Ford trained as an architect, and in his perfume line he uses an architectural model of attribution. A building carries the architect’s name, even though the architect did not lay the bricks, install the windows or run the wiring. The architect’s work consists in making the labour of many people answer to a single decision.

Tom Ford fragrances are sold primarily as works by Tom Ford. The person who physically assembled the formula often goes unnamed even on Fragrantica. Ford’s talent in perfumery lies precisely in choosing the right person, setting the task, and drawing from very different perfumers a result that is then unmistakably legible as Tom Ford.

Frédéric Malle chose another model. He calls himself a publisher and the perfumers authors. Their names appear on the bottles.

Malle gave perfumers their credits, but that did not make him disappear from the work. He chooses the author, discusses the concept, rejects certain modifications, and walks away from almost-finished perfumes — whatever he may say in interviews about unlimited creative freedom.

It is a classic literary arrangement: the perfumer writes the book, Malle edits and publishes it.

Even the bottle design works as a system of credits. Malle’s black panel, pale cursive and red capitals look remarkably similar to old Rochas labels. But Malle seems to reverse their hierarchy: on Rochas bottles, the perfumer’s name never appeared on the front at all; on Malle’s, it stands at the top, the fragrance name sits in the centre, and Malle’s own name appears below, almost like a publisher’s imprint.

Edmond Roudnitska’s Le Parfum de Thérèse was part of the house’s first collection, so it is extremely tempting to see this as a deliberate quotation of Rochas, the house with which Roudnitska’s history was so closely connected.

It would make a small essay on authorship printed directly on the bottle.

Chanel uses yet another model. The house has an official in-house perfumer, today Olivier Polge. But Chanel’s laboratory has never consisted of a single person.

Christopher Sheldrake worked first alongside Jacques Polge and then alongside Olivier. He joined Chanel in the mid-2000s while continuing to create perfumes for Lutens, which meant that, for a time, he was an author in two houses at once, under two different names that were not his own.

Officially, the author of modern Chanel fragrances is Olivier Polge.

And yet I sometimes think I can hear Sheldrake in some of them. Especially in Le Lion, with its dense, dark, almost Lutens-esque construction. This is my hypothesis, and it may be completely wrong. I have no document stating: here Sheldrake proposed the foundation, here Polge changed the proportions, here they selected the final modification together.

The bottle does not tell us either. A chromatograph will show labdanum, vanilla and patchouli, which is also fairly useless in this case.

The name on the bottle is not the result of chemical analysis, it is someone’s decision about how the work should be read. At Serge Lutens, Sheldrake was hidden behind the name of an art director. At Chanel, he may be hidden behind the name of another perfumer.

What I call mine

The four theses above concern other people’s work. Since authors are now being invited to publish explanatory statements about exactly how they work, here is mine.

1. I do the smelling myself. On my own skin, not through descriptions on websites. If I write that a dry bitterness emerges in the sillage during the third hour, it means I lived with that fragrance for three hours. The machine cannot take my nose away from me yet.

2. The associations, memories and comparisons that occasionally embarrass me afterwards are also mine. They are the main product. A blog about scent is someone else’s nose being used as an optical instrument. There is no universe in which I lend my nose to somebody else to wear.

3. Knowledge is more complicated. I have spent many years reading about perfume: books, blogs, interviews, forums, archives and articles. Some things I remember precisely. Some the machine finds faster. Sometimes I know a fact but no longer remember where I encountered it for the first time.

“Ernest Beaux brought Coco Chanel two numbered series of samples: one through five and twenty through twenty-four...” That can be checked.

But it is sometimes impossible to establish where a particular idea of Mitsouko entered my head. If I know whose idea it is, I name the author. But I cannot promise that every thought has emerged inside my hermetically sealed head and had never occurred to anyone before.

Nobody can. I can see how closely Malle’s labels resemble old Rochas labels, but I do not know (and probably neither does Frédéric himself) whether this was a quotation, a homage, or a memory that returned without its source.

4. When I write in English (it is my third language), the machine sometimes helps me with it. It may suggest a word, rearrange a sentence, or notice that I have lost an article again. It may even translate an entire passage that I wrote in my native language because that was easier for me. If I ever have nothing to say about a fragrance, I will not ask somebody else to say it instead, I simply will not write the post.

That, I think, is all the ethics required here. Not purity of origin, but responsibility for the result.

The wrong scale

Now I can return to the button.

You can use AI and leave more of yourself in a text than someone who typed every word by hand. You can generate nothing and write a completely lifeless text. You can ask a machine to propose twenty versions, reject all twenty, and only on the twenty-first finally understand what you wanted to say yourself. The detector will see traces of the first twenty, it will not see that they went into the bin.

In that sense, the comparison with a chromatograph is almost too flattering to the detector. A chromatograph at least directly registers substances. Pangram just makes a probabilistic inference from features of language with some claimed precision and recall.

But even if it guessed correctly, it still answered the wrong question.

Where nobody wrote the text at all, e.g. on slop farms producing hundred posts a day, the detector catches exactly the thing it was built to catch, and that is useful. But I do not want a garbage filter to be sold to me as an instrument for establishing authorship, because “AI was used here” does not mean “there was no author here.”

Just as the presence of Sheldrake does not imply the absence of Lutens. The hands of Ernest Beaux do not imply the absence of Chanel. Bisch’s name does not erase Barrois’s participation. The perfumer’s name on a Malle bottle does not erase Malle’s own role. And the fact that Tom Ford did not personally mix the formula does not prove that the resulting fragrance is not his.

Creative work does not add up arithmetically.

Authorship is not a solution of two components that can be poured into three columns: human, human with machine, machine.

Sometimes the person is located not in the words that remained, but in the ones they threw away, or in a conversation lasting many years, after which it is no longer possible to know who first had the idea, or in a single “no” that transformed somebody else’s entire work…

Sometimes in the decision to choose the fifth sample.

Chris Best ends his piece by saying that when he needs Claude’s opinion, he will ask Claude.

Fair enough, and I would say the same thing, but the button merely looks for traces of a tool in the result.

The wrong place

On the same day, Substack gave authors a second thing: the ability to write about how they work. These could have been our credits, but look at where Substack placed them: beside the scanner’s verdict. In that location, they cease to be credits and become the explanatory note of a schoolchild who failed to hand in their homework. That is why mine is demonstratively sarcastic. I am not going to take the position of someone proving their innocence.

Credits appear at the end of a film because the director decided they would. Roudnitska’s name appears at the top of the bottle and Malle’s at the bottom, in the publisher’s imprint, because Malle decided it like that. That label functions as a statement about authorship because its hierarchy is established by the publisher, not by an inspector.

Placement inside the object is part of the statement. It belongs on the author’s page, or in the publication’s About section, or in an optional footnote at the end of a post. But it should live where the author chose to put it themselves, and not somewhere they were forced to defend themselves.

Perfumery has never established authorship systematically. Malle brought perfumers’ names to the bottles. Ford signed perfumes he did not mix, as an architect signs houses he did not build. Chanel signs as a laboratory. None of these methods measures anything, and none corresponds to an objective proportion. Each one declares how the object should be read and appoints the person who takes responsibility for it.

And none of those signatures appears beside the result of an external examination.

Get the chromatograph to run. It will say Chanel No. 5: peaks, molecules, and ratios. All of what was left. The rest is not in the bottle.

Not the four samples Beaux brought alongside the fifth. Not the ones he decided not to bring at all. Not the second in which Coco said: this one.

The detector sees the text that survived, but true authorship most often remains in the wastepaper basket.

In the end, authorship is the signature beneath what remained.

Buying vintage perfume sounds romantic until you actually try to do it.

You begin with a simple intention. Let’s say you would like to smell Chanel No.5 before it became the Chanel No.5 currently sold in shops. Or somebody has told you that Diorissimo died in 2009. Or you have seen an old bottle of Shalimar and decided that anything this beautiful must contain a more beautiful version of the perfume.

Ten minutes later, you are comparing four bottles with different caps, three shades of liquid, two incompatible production dates and one seller who describes all of them as EXTREMELY RARE VINTAGE OLD FORMULA PERFECT.

The good news is that you do not need to memorise every Guerlain label, Chanel batch code and discontinued Coty presentation before buying anything. Sooner or later, you will probably end up on Raiders of the Lost Scent, comparing the bottoms of bottles and learning more about barcodes than you had ever intended to know. But there is no need to start there. For now, you need to know what you are hoping to find, recognise a few obvious risks and accept that no amount of research can turn an old bottle into a controlled experiment.

First, decide what you actually want

“Vintage perfume” describes several different desires which happen to involve old liquid.

You may want an earlier formula of a perfume you already know. You may be looking for something discontinued. You may want to understand a period or style. You may want a beautiful bottle. You may want the perfume your mother wore, or a decade you did not experience but have nevertheless decided was better.

Quite often you are buying nostalgia. This is not necessarily your own nostalgia. The further a period recedes, the easier it becomes to miss it. Nobody remembers the administrative work, bad dentistry or unreformed men. We remember gloves, lipstick, nightclub photographs and formulas containing materials now spoken about as though they were extinct orchestral instruments.

The past improves enormously once it is no longer required to function.

There is nothing wrong with wanting part of it. But it helps to know whether you want the smell, the object, the history or the fantasy. They occasionally arrive together.

But a bottle may be beautiful and the perfume inside dead. An ugly partial may contain the best-preserved version you will ever find. A perfume may be historically important and completely wrong for you. A reformulation may be less grand than its predecessor and much nicer to wear.

Vintage collecting becomes expensive when all these questions collapse into one:

Is this the real one?

The original formula is not the original smell

When people say they want the original Shalimar or the real Mitsouko, they usually mean a bottle manufactured closer to an earlier formula.

This is not quite the same thing.

A perfume at fifty is no longer exactly the perfume it was when it left the factory. The lightest materials may have weakened or disappeared. The base may have grown louder. Heat, light, oxygen and decades of storage have continued editing the composition.

You are smelling the formula and everything that has happened to it since.

I have already spent an unreasonable number of words elsewhere on why this makes the idea of an “original” perfume almost impossible, so I will try not to do it again here. The useful part for a first-time buyer is simple: an older bottle does not give you direct access to the perfumer’s pristine intention. It gives you a surviving object.

I have several versions of Mitsouko, and they do not arrange themselves neatly on a scale from authentic to ruined. The 1980s version that first made me fall in love with it is distinctly fruity. A bottle from the 1970s surprised me by being much greener. They belong recognisably to the same family, but one is not simply the other with additional prestige.

They are relatives. They disagree about certain events.

Some differences come from reformulation, others come from concentration, production period, batch variation or ageing. Usually we cannot isolate one explanation with complete confidence, particularly when comparing two liquids that have spent forty years in different countries under unknown domestic arrangements.

And the date is only one variable. A vintage extrait and a vintage eau de toilette of the same perfume are not the same composition at different volumes. Concentration can alter the whole shape of it.

When I first became interested in vintage perfume, I did not understand why anybody bought old eaux de toilette or colognes if an extrait existed. Surely the extrait was the real one and everything else was a diluted concession to people who did not know better.

Shalimar corrected me. The extrait develops slowly, one part after another, and can feel almost staged. The lighter concentrations are more open; more of the perfume seems to happen at once. They are not cheaper seats for the same performance. They are different performances, and somebody who loves the slow unfolding of Shalimar extrait may not want a large old EdT simply because it is older and contains more millilitres.

Sometimes the point is not to determine which version is best, but to discover how many perfumes have lived under one name.

Start with a perfume, not with “vintage”

The easiest way to become overwhelmed is to decide that you would like to collect vintage perfume in general.

Choose one question. How did a perfume you already wear change? What did a discontinued favourite smell like before it disappeared? How do the concentrations of one classic differ?

A familiar perfume is often the best place to begin because you already have a reference. Comparing modern Chanel No.5 with a bottle from the 1970s or 1980s teaches you more than buying a random “aldehydic vintage floral” whose original character you do not know.

You may love the older version, but you also may find it heavier, stranger or less balanced. You may discover that the current perfume is thinner but clearer. You may even realise that the element everyone mourns is the one you least enjoy.

Vintage culture tends to assume that history runs in one direction: the original was a masterpiece, each reformulation removed something essential, and the current bottle is the exhausted descendant living off the family name.

Sometimes that is broadly true. And sometimes an older formula is richer but harder to wear. It may happen that a modern version restores a balance a previous reformulation had lost. Or a famous vintage is simply not your taste, and no amount of oakmoss can make this a moral failure.

The past contained bad perfume too.

Buy something cheap enough to dislike

A useful first vintage does not need to be pre-war, sealed or famous.

Start with the 1980s or 1990s. Even the early 2000s now qualify as vintage under the common twenty-year definition.

Early Light Blue is vintage.

I apologise.

It is not what people usually mean when they say that something “smells vintage”, which is another problem entirely. That normally means dense abstract flowers, aldehydes, moss, animalics, lipstick, powder — a whole olfactory period costume. Light Blue does not smell vintage. It is simply old.

(This will happen to all of us.)

Perfumes from the 1980s onwards are easier to identify, more plentiful and less financially dramatic. They can still differ greatly from what is sold under the same name now.

Partial bottles are often ideal if your purpose is to smell the perfume. Somebody else has already absorbed the anxiety of breaking the seal and the premium attached to untouched packaging. You can see the liquid level, ask about the contents and buy an amount you may plausibly use. Miniatures are useful too, especially for extraits: not automatically well preserved, but an affordable way into concentrations that would be painful in a full bottle.

What I would not recommend as a first vintage is a legendary sealed extrait purchased for an amount that will affect your ability to admit disappointment.

I have bought spoiled vintage First by Van Cleef & Arpels twice. Not subtly altered, not challenging in a historically interesting way — spoiled. Within a minute of application, everything I had hoped to smell was gone, and what remained was metal: the taste of a battery on the tongue, translated into a smell and fastened to my wrist for the rest of the day. It outlasted soap.

Had I spent a great deal, I might have begun inventing reasons why the metallic effect was actually a lost aspect of vintage perfumery.

Collectors become extremely imaginative under financial pressure. An expensive mistake rarely smells merely bad. It smells animalic, austere, difficult, historically correct. Perhaps the top has suffered, but what a magnificent base! Perhaps the persistent smell of varnish is an unusual interaction between aldehydes and vintage oakmoss…

Perhaps the perfume is dead.

Buy something you can afford to judge honestly.

Learn one bottle at a time

Dating vintage perfume can become a separate hobby. There are collectors who can identify a production window from the width of a label border or the shape of a stopper.

You do not need to become one of them before buying your first bottle. You need to learn the perfume you are currently considering.

Search for reliable photographs of confirmed examples. Compare the bottle, label, box and concentration. Look at sold listings, not only the seller’s claims. Check whether the size existed in that presentation and period, and whether bottle and box plausibly belong together.

A supposedly 1950s perfume should not have a modern barcode. A bottle photographed in one image and a box photographed in another may be a marriage assembled later.

This is not always fraud. Companies reused packaging, changed details gradually and sold different presentations in different markets. Bottles were separated from boxes and reunited decades later by people with no reason to understand the historical consequences. Anyways, you are not trying to establish whether the bottle was filled on a Tuesday in March 1975. You are checking whether the story is coherent enough for the price.

The colour of the liquid is part of that story, but only part. A dark liquid may be oxidised. It may contain materials that darken naturally. It may have concentrated through evaporation. It may be perfectly wearable. It may be dead. Colour is information, not a verdict.

The seller is information too, and often more useful. Do not ask only whether the perfume is “good”. “Good” can mean that liquid comes out. Ask how it smells when first applied and after ten minutes. Ask whether there is anything sour, metallic, varnish-like or rancid in the opening, and whether the base is recognisable.

When I asked one seller about the condition of a forty-year-old extrait, she replied: “Smells normal. Like perfume.” This told me everything about the listing. A seller who specialises in vintage will answer differently — and, unfortunately, price accordingly.

A sealed bottle is not automatically safer. It may have remained untouched in its box, or spent thirty summers in a hot apartment. Nobody can smell it before purchase, including the seller. “New in box” describes use, not storage.

“Kept in a dark wardrobe” is better than kept in sunlight, but the phrase has become the foundational myth of vintage selling. Every old perfume in Europe appears to have spent its entire life in a dark wardrobe belonging to somebody’s grandmother.

The grandmothers of Europe possessed enormous wardrobes.

Before buying, I would at least do this:

• Compare the bottle and colour with examples from a similar period and concentration.

• Look for cloudiness, sediment, leakage and a dramatically lowered level.

• Examine the neck, stopper and atomiser; ask whether the spray works.

• Ask for photographs in natural light, including the base of the bottle.

• Ask what happens after ten minutes, not just whether it “smells good”.

None of this guarantees anything. It converts blind faith into an informed gamble, which is the best available product in this market.

Old, damaged or simply not for you

The top of an old perfume is often the most vulnerable part.

You may spray something and get several minutes of sourness, dust or flat citrus before a recognisable heart and base emerge. This may be worth living with. It may also ruin the experience for you.

Try to separate three possibilities:

1. The perfume has aged.

2. The perfume is damaged.

3. The perfume is healthy and you do not like it.

These categories overlap because “spoiled” is easier to say than “I bought a historically important fragrance and discovered that I dislike bitter moss, civet and old-fashioned florals.”

Vintage perfume may smell drier, more bitter, more animalic, less sweet or more densely floral than modern perfume even in excellent condition. If you mostly wear contemporary perfumes, a healthy vintage can initially smell not damaged exactly, but wrong in a way that is difficult to locate. The proportions are unfamiliar. The flowers are too abstract. The base begins before you are ready for it. Nothing is making the usual effort to be pleasant in the first thirty seconds.

Do not assume every difficult smell is damage. Do not assume every difficult smell is genius either.

Open it

Vintage perfume encourages a strange form of deferred ownership. The bottle was expensive, the seal survived for forty years, the box is perfect… what if it should be kept for a special occasion, or until you understand it better, or until you become the sort of person who casually deserves an unopened Guerlain extrait?

Meanwhile, the perfume continues ageing.

I understand preserving genuinely rare historical objects. I also understand buying a bottle because it is beautiful and never intending to open it. But that is a different purchase. If you bought the perfume in order to smell it, at some point you have to allow the liquid out.

This sounds obvious until there is an intact seal in front of you and you become personally responsible for ending a small piece of history.

End it.

The seal is not the perfume. Nor is the box, the tassel, the little velvet platform or the forty-year achievement of remaining unsprayed. Those things may have their own value, but they cannot tell you whether you like what is inside.

Open the partial. Use the miniature. Accept that some old stoppers have spent several decades becoming part of the bottle and may now require negotiations. Find out what survived.

Then put it on your skin.

Wear it wrongly at least once

Vintage perfume arrives with instructions written by other people.

Shalimar is for cold weather. Mitsouko is for autumn. Chanel requires restraint and an unspecified personal tragedy. I have never understood why.

I love vintage Shalimar in blazing dry heat. Warmth loosens it. What can feel dense or formal in the cold becomes languid and narcotic, much closer to the fantasy the perfume was supposed to contain in the first place.

And wear Mitsouko when you are happy. Wear it in spring, in daylight, on a day when nobody has left you and Europe has not just emerged from a war. Oakmoss is not an obligation to be sad. Half the melancholy attached to old chypres comes from photographs, advertising, film actresses, old criticism and the fact that we now encounter the bottles as remains of another time. The perfume itself may have other plans.

Wear the extrait casually. Wear the severe green No.19 to buy groceries. Wear the famous evening perfume like Bal à Versailles at eleven in the morning. Not because rules must always be broken — sometimes the obvious season really is the best one — but because inherited instructions can hide the perfume as effectively as a damaged top note. You begin smelling what you have been told is there: autumn, fur, sadness, a woman with a past. Then one warm day the same perfume smells green, almost cheerful, and you realise nobody mentioned that because everybody had been reading the same description for eighty years.

This is also how you discover whether you wanted the perfume or a convincing piece of its reputation.

Your first vintage purchase does not need to reveal the definitive version of anything. There probably is no definitive version left to reveal. It only needs to teach you something: how a familiar perfume changed, what age does to a structure, which concentration you prefer, or whether you enjoy this particular combination of perfume, old glass and uncertainty at all.

Buy a bottle you can afford to misunderstand. The rest will happen by itself. One day you will open eBay with the modest intention of checking a single listing and find yourself comparing the bases of five nearly identical bottles.

At that point, no guide can help you.

I went to Jovoy in March to meet Ambre Antique — the resurrected Coty, the pilgrimage scent, the one everyone had been making noises about. I smelled it. Nothing happened. It sat on the blotter being historically important while I stood there like a person who has finally seen the Mona Lisa and found it small.

I would love to tell you that a sales assistant noticed my crisis and rescued me. The assistants at Jovoy that day had perfected a more advanced skill: not seeing customers at all. Fine, I thought. I installed my daughter on a pouf with Tiny Wings — the little bird flapping up and down its hills with the sound of pure dopamine — and went to work the shelves myself. In retrospect, this was the best thing that could have happened, and not only because self-service keeps you honest.

That is how I ended up in front of Strangelove NYC, a brand I had never heard of. This does me no credit: it had existed for more than a decade by then, launched at Harrods in 2014 with a single perfume oil built around real oud — the kind of house that people better informed than me had been buying all along. I put lostinflowers on my left wrist and meltmyheart on my right and spent the next twenty minutes moving my nose from one arm to the other like a metronome. My daughter cleared four islands.

Edmond Roudnitska defined a beautiful perfume as “the one which gives us a shock: a sensory one followed by a psychological one.” I can now report that the definition works under field conditions, and in exactly that order. The first shock was physical — the kind of smell that skips the brain entirely and goes for the spine. The second arrived at the hotel, when I finally looked the brand up and read the notes. Chocolate, orris, oud. I sat there thinking: the chocolate is obviously in there. Why can’t I call it chocolate?

There was also a third shock, smaller and vainer: the price. Consider the setup. A store with several thousand bottles. No guidance, no brand legend, no meaningful glances toward a locked cabinet — nobody performing the word “exclusive” at me. And my nose marched, unassisted, to nearly the most expensive thing in the building. Expensive perfume is a standing test of consciousness — do I love this, or do I love knowing what it costs? — and the test almost never runs cleanly, because the price tag walks into the room before the smell does. This time the experiment conducted itself: no name, no story, no numbers, nothing to love except what was coming off my own arm. I would like to present the result as proof of connoisseurship. Honestly, it felt more like being a truffle pig: the animal doesn’t know the market rate, it just digs where it digs. The compliment goes to the truffle.

Now notice what I have been doing for three paragraphs. Is the oud real. What does it cost. Where was it sourced. I slipped into it without noticing, because this is simply how we talk now: perfume criticism has become ingredient criticism. We discuss whether the oud is natural, what orris butter runs per kilo, which jasmine — Grasse or sambac. We audit perfumes the way customs officers audit luggage. Imagine architecture criticism that only ever counted the bricks.

The ingredient reflex is not entirely our fault. Notes come to us pre-packaged with genres: every material arrives with a costume on, and reading a note list means expecting the costumes to walk out on stage. No material is more heavily costumed than oud — rose-oud, gold caps, ornamental smoke, the whole one-thousand-and-one-nights of it. Strangelove undressed it. A Manhattan apartment instead of a majlis: the founder, Elizabeth Gaynes, had brought oud oil back from Borneo; Helena Christensen came by to pick up her son from a playdate and got stuck in the doorway because of how the apartment smelled. That is the origin story — a school run.

Then there are the names, which refuse capital letters and spaces: meltmyheart, deadofnight, lostinflowers, silencetheseas. They read like texts sent at two in the morning — a plea, a timestamp, a confession, an impossible command. Nobody sober orders the seas to be quiet. And this, I think, is the exact register the perfumes themselves operate in: past politeness, past grammar, past the point where you care how you look.

meltmyheart was the perfume that made me stop thinking about ingredients and start thinking about architecture.

Formally: dark chocolate, orris butter, oud, sandalwood, ylang. The brand calls it a grown-up gourmand, and “expensive unsweet chocolate” would be the easy review — an ingredient review. But watch what the composition does instead. It doesn’t unfold the way perfumes are supposed to, top to heart to base, a narrative with acts. There is no plot. It is a single volume that you enter, and what changes over the hours is not the story but the light inside the room.

The sensation of mass is built on contrast: cocoa as dust — the dryness that catches slightly in the throat — set against orris as butter, meaning as fat, the way the word actually says. Dry against fatty, dark against smooth, and between them the composition acquires weight the way a wall acquires load: you can’t point to the note doing it. And this is why the chocolate doesn’t look like chocolate. Every component has been fired from its usual job. The chocolate is denied sugar, and without sugar’s context it stops performing dessert and becomes material — matte, dense, almost bodily. The orris doesn’t turn the perfume into powder, a makeup bag, or cold Chanel elegance. And the oud never announces that an oud perfume is now beginning, because it isn’t working as a note at all. It works as structure: rebar in the concrete, salt through dough that never tastes of the sea. You can’t smell where it is, but remove it and the whole volume collapses.

, who composed all four originals around real oud — two kinds, sustainably sourced — has spent his career insisting that perfume is an art form and deserves to be discussed like one. The least a critic can do is stop counting his bricks. So: on skin meltmyheart doesn’t develop so much as change your aggregate state. A gourmand after appetite. Chocolate stripped of dessert.

I’ve been wearing it since March, and even its relationship with weather is architectural. In Paris, in spring, it read as warmth — something between a heated stone and the inside of a coat. In July it reads as shade: a dark room with the shutters closed at noon, chocolate as coolness rather than comfort.

The other three originals run on the same principle, so I’ll be briefer.

lostinflowers is officially red champaca, gardenia enfleurage and oakmoss — a moss the brand itself describes as earthy, damp, animal, nearly leather. So no, not another big white floral. It is blooming pushed to biological excess: the flower smells not like the perfect image of a flower but like the whole organism at once — petal, sap, bark, dampness, reproduction, the first suggestion of rot. Flowers stop being decorative and become metabolic.

deadofnight is the most literally oud-y of the four — oud, violet leaf, ambergris — and the least rewarding to interrogate in the usual way (animalic or medicinal? barnyard or Band-Aid?). It behaves like an object being slowly turned under a lamp: now leather, now wet wood, now green, now something uncomfortably human. No plot, no pyramid. A surface study of a single material.

silencetheseas contains not one molecule of blue: ambergris, hyraceum, leather, narcissus, frankincense, white truffle, oud. (Yes, white truffle. Given my performance at Jovoy, I choose to take that personally.) Not the sea as scenery but the sea as chemistry — the long process by which the living becomes mineral. A thing that once belonged to an animal floats in salt water for decades and washes up as treasure. Body, salt, stone, digestion, time.

The brand’s own explanation is that the original quartet is four love stories, each built around oud. Fine, as explanations go, but “seduction, passion, eternal bond” is what perfume copy says when it has run out of things to say. Look at the names instead. Night swallows every visible outline. The seas are ordered to be silent. You get lost in flowers. A heart melts. Four ways of losing your outline. The materials do exactly the same thing: floral turns animal, gourmand turns mineral, marine turns bodily. Nothing in these perfumes keeps its tidy separateness — which, come to think of it, is a better definition of love than anything in the ad copy.

It also finally explains what I was doing at Jovoy for those twenty minutes, swinging between two wrists while a small bird flapped through its hills on my daughter’s screen. lostinflowers swallows you from the outside; meltmyheart changes your state of matter from the inside. Two kinds of surrender. I ordered meltmyheart before I had finished unpacking from Paris.

I chose melting.

The Coty, meanwhile, remains historically important.

Okay. Who has a perfume collection?

And who has... a situation on the dresser? A zone. An accumulation you’ve agreed not to discuss with your family?

Sir, you raised your hand all three times. You’re either very self-aware or you’re about to be the subject of this entire show.

So my corner of the internet goes to war regularly. Not over a perfume. Over a noun.

Someone writes a beginner’s guide — how to start a perfume wardrobe. The most harmless genre in existence. Ten classics, smell these first, here’s your map of the landmarks. This article has been written four hundred times and will be written four hundred more, because beginners keep being born and Chanel No. 5 keeps existing.

The comments respond the way our community responds to everything: as if someone had proposed rezoning a cemetery.

Because he said “wardrobe.” And some people have “collections.” And it turns out these are not the same thing. It turns out the difference is moral.

The theology

Here’s the doctrine, as I understand it. A wardrobe is perfume you wear. A collection is perfume you... also have.

That’s it. Two words for “bottles in my apartment.” But one of them comes with a diagnosis.

A wardrobe is a relationship. A collection is a hoard with shelving. A wardrobe says “I know who I am.” A collection says “check on me.”

I tried to get clarity from a believer. Actual conversation:

— So if I wear all forty, it’s a wardrobe?

— Yes.

— And if I wear thirty-nine?

— Then one of them is a collection.

— One bottle is a collection?

— One bottle is the beginning of a collection. Like one cigarette.

One cigarette! We’re doing gateway theory now. This woman looked at my Mitsouko like it was a syringe in a playground.

And can we talk about the metaphor we chose? Of all the words in the language, the symbol of honest, functional ownership is... a wardrobe?

Have these people opened a wardrobe? Any wardrobe? Show me one closet on this planet without a dress waiting for “the occasion.” Without jeans from a former administration of the body. Without a single garment kept purely so that a specific person never gets to be right about it. The wardrobe is where optimism goes to hang.

That’s the gold standard? If perfume shelves have to pass honesty audits, the world’s closets should be tried in The Hague.

The three permits

Now — the doctrine does allow collecting. You just need a license. There are exactly three legitimate reasons to own more perfume than you wear.

One: you’re planning to open a museum.

Two: you work with fragrance professionally and need reference materials.

Three: clinical.

Curator, scientist, or patient. Please approach the window with your documents.

And I imagine this window. Little bureaucrat, little stamp.

— Purpose of your bottles?

— Joy.

— (flipping through the folder) Joy, joy... Joy is not on the list. I can offer you “museum.”

— I’m not opening a museum.

— Everyone says that. Then, twenty years later — no museum, no exit strategy, forty bottles and a look in the eyes. I’ll put you down as “pending diagnosis,” it’s the fastest queue.

The usage audit

Here’s what kills me. This entire moral framework rests on one metric: usage. Perfume you don’t deploy is perfume you must justify.

No other collector on Earth lives under this law.

My friend collects vintage postcards. Beautiful things — steamships, spa towns, women in enormous hats. You know what nobody has ever asked her?

“So how many postcards did you send this month?”

Nobody demands her mailing records. Nobody says: “Three shoeboxes? Do you even have four hundred friends? Name them.” Nobody checks whether her correspondence is wearable. She has never once stood at a mailbox at dawn, feeding steamships into the slot to prove her innocence.

The stamp collector — has never been asked to mail anything. Ever. That’s the whole hobby: postage, refusing to postage.

The coin guy? Nobody tells the coin guy: “Until you buy bread with that denarius, this is a disorder.” Nobody watches him at the bakery going, “and one croissant — (sliding a doubloon across the counter) — keep the change, it’s from a wardrobe, not a collection.”

It’s just us. Perfume people get the usage audit. Us and book people — book people know this pain. “Have you read all of these?” Yes, David. Twice. Alphabetically. In the original French, which I learned for this purpose and this purpose only.

Book people, perfume people — we should unionize. Everyone else gets to have things. We have to perform them.

Field diagnostics

But my favorite part of the doctrine is the detection protocol. Because apparently you can identify a Collector across the room at a launch event. By the unhealthy gleam in the eyes.

We’ve reinvented physiognomy. Nineteenth-century science is back, and it’s holding a discovery set. A man with calipers: “The distance between your eyes indicates... a decant habit. And this jawline. Madam, this is the jawline of someone with four Shalimars.”

Psychiatrists train for ten years to say “maybe” about a patient they’ve spent forty hours with. A fragrance commentator needs one glance. Across a room. Through a cloud of ambroxan.

And I keep thinking — I’ve been at those launches. I’ve had that gleam. That gleam is called “I left work early, I skipped lunch, and something in this room smells like 1987.” What are my eyes supposed to do instead? Be matte? If your eyes aren’t gleaming at a launch, why did you come? For the prosecco? The prosecco is warm. The prosecco is always warm.

There are other symptoms on the checklist, allegedly. Something about how we dress. I’m not touching that one — my winter coat is in storage and can’t defend me until November.

The worst part: a woman once stared at me across a presentation for a solid minute. Intense eye contact. I did the little smile. I mouthed “call me.”

She was counting my bottles.

The honesty clause

Then there’s the philosophical core, and I need you to brace yourselves, because it’s beautiful:

“An empty bottle is when you don’t lie to yourself.”

Perfume. As the last bastion of human honesty.

I lie on LinkedIn. I lie to my dentist — “yes, every evening, sometimes twice.” I told a man his tattoo was “interesting” four separate times. My whole life is a diplomatic communiqué. But my shelf — that’s where truth lives? Between a candle and the samples I’ve been “getting to” since March?

And note: the doctrine never defines wearing. Is spraying my scarf wearing? My pillow? If I put some on at 11 PM for no one — did it count, or does wearing require witnesses? If I open a cap on a Sunday and just inhale — is that wearing, or visiting? Do I need to check in? Is there a punch card? “This bottle hasn’t been worn since 2023” — it’s not milk. It doesn’t spoil from being loved incorrectly.

And what is the lie, exactly? The doctrine says: owning a fragrance everyone admires but you don’t wear. That’s the sin. That’s the self-deception.

Guys. That’s not a lie. That’s a bottle. It just stands there. It has no testimony. Objects cannot commit perjury.

I did try to locate the lie. Ran a formal interrogation on myself, fragcomm internal affairs style:

— Do you wear the chypre?

— No.

— Do you tell people you wear it?

— No.

— Do you tell yourself you wear it?

— No. The chypre and I are fully briefed on the situation. There is no deception on either side. We nod at each other in passing. It’s very Scandinavian.

— Then where, precisely, is the lie?

— (long pause, shuffling of papers) The lie is... implied.

Case closed. The chypre stays. Historically significant and unworn. Both things are true, and neither one is a betrayal.

A confession

Now. Full disclosure, because this crowd deserves the truth.

Years ago... I wrote one of these guides myself.

Mine had levels.

Level One. Level Two. It had vectors. It said “define your goals.” It said “consider your social scenarios.” I made a framework. For smelling nice. I essentially wrote a McKinsey deck about my own neck.

And I remember the era of writing it. During — not after, during — the writing of that text, I bought a perfume because I was sad and it smelled like a hug. Which was the exact behavior the framework was designed to eliminate. I was writing a constitution for a country that was already on fire.

Sometimes I imagine past me interviewing present me.

— So. Walk me through your acquisition strategy.

— I was sad and it smelled like a hug.

— ...And which vector is that?

— Sadness. The sadness vector. It’s load-bearing.

— What about your goals? Your scenarios? Your seasonal matrix?

— The matrix is fine. The matrix is laminated. I keep it in the drawer under the bottles it failed to prevent.

She would have diagnosed me on sight, past me. She had the gleam too — just a different one. The gleam of a woman who believes a spreadsheet can protect her.

The gleam doesn’t come with subtitles

I’ll name the actual problem with the whole doctrine, and then I’ll let you go.

It runs on one assumption: that you can read a stranger’s motives from across a room.

That woman grabbing three bottles on launch day at full price — the one with the gleam? Maybe it’s mania, sure. Or maybe she’s had the single worst year of her life, and this is the cheapest joy available to her per milliliter. Maybe it’s grief — grief buys in threes, I’ve seen it. Maybe she’s an evaluator and this is just Tuesday. Maybe she’s building the museum — and you, with your commentary, will not be invited to the opening. There will be a plaque. “This wing exists despite Jane.”

You don’t know. The gleam doesn’t come with subtitles.

Meanwhile — the one person whose motives I’ve had unlimited research access to is me. Thirty-six years of continuous observation. Full archive. Direct interviews with the subject, daily. And I still get it wrong. I have stood at a counter narrating my reason for a purchase, out loud, and the narration was false in real time.

And I’m supposed to decode a stranger? By her eyes?

So call it whatever you want. Wardrobe. Collection. Shelf. Shrine. Archive. Evidence locker. Wear all of it, wear a third of it, wear none of it and just lift the caps on Sundays like a groundskeeper.

The bottles don’t care what you call them. They’re not listening.

Mine are listening. But that’s a different post.

Goodnight. Smile to your sales associates. They’ve seen the gleam up close, and they’ve never once called it unhealthy — they call it “welcome back.”

I read about Dusita for years before I smelled it. The trouble with living like that — here, then there, then somewhere else — is that you’re never in the one city with the big perfumery, and whatever everyone’s losing their minds over is always a step behind you or a step ahead. So I read. I knew the whole story of the house before a single drop touched my skin — a slightly humiliating way to be in love with anything.

A couple of years ago, when everyone had long cooled off and moved to the next thing, Dusita made it to Chișinău. And — unfortunately — almost nothing landed. I’d waited all that time and it just slid off, didn’t suit me, didn’t click. Two survived, Issara and Erawan. They stand so close that Pissara could have sold them as the eau and the extrait of one perfume, one name, and nobody would have blinked — the way nobody minds that the three Chanel no 5s don’t smell alike. But never mind.

I took a 15ml of Erawan. Then, soon, a second 15. And this Saturday I finally stopped pretending and admitted I need the 50.

Why it got me — and it’s not a flattering reason — is that I’m weak for a fougère. I love how relaxed they are. I love Jicky, I love Pour un homme de Caron, I love lavender, full stop — we have our own lavender fields here, you don’t have to sell me on it. The whole family is, really, childhood under a French name. Technically it’s the men’s aisle: fougères get sold to men, the barbershop, the aftershave — and I reach straight past the sweet, the pretty, the properly feminine for it without a thought. My grandfather’s shaving soap was a fougère, and I’d sit and watch him shave the way, I think, every child did: the brush whipping up the lather, the straight razor, the strop, the blade worked back and forth along the skin, the slow careful scrape. The whole ceremony, and over all of it that clean cool soap smell. The wardrobes at home smelled of it too: the dried lavender someone always tucked among the linens against the moths. Lavender is faceless, it’s the grey suit of smells. The family is even named after a fern, and a fern smells of nothing at all — the whole genre is a beautiful made-up nothing somebody invented in 1882. And even the famous origin story is a small swindle: the English were already making this exact fern, Trumper’s Wild Fern and the rest, and Houbigant lifted it, renamed it from wild Wild to Royal Fern so it would sound expensive, and took the credit for a hundred years. So it’s a made-up nothing, borrowed and relabelled to sound grand.

(The English and the French will turn anything into a contest and always have. Two countries that still can’t agree which of their kings was first to cure scrofula — a swelling of the glands in the neck — by walking a row of sick peasants and laying on hands. That was a genuine service the crown provided. And the thing historians come to blows over, a thousand years on, is who got there first. So forgive me for not losing sleep over a stolen fern.)

Erawan is the one that took all of that and made it a place I actually want to be. There isn’t even lavender in it, strictly: the official notes say clary sage, some herb doing lavender’s job. Doesn’t matter. It lands in exactly the same spot. What else is in there — I won’t say, and I won’t dress the not-knowing up as a riddle: half of what’s worth wearing is seamless like that, you don’t take a person apart into a nose and two eyes either. Pissara said it better than I could: it’s grass in the jungle after the elephants have walked over it. Trampled. And the second she says it you have the whole thing, in a way no note list would give you, because everyone alive has smelled green crushed open and going warm in the sun — the sap, the bruise — and nobody has smelled “petitgrain.” Of course it’s elephants. Erawan is the elephant, the gold three-headed one on the shrine in Bangkok that people bury in marigolds. With a name like that you brace for a temple. She laid him down in a field.

It isn’t quiet, whatever people want to think — I smell it on myself all day. It just won’t ever win me a compliment, and I’ve made my peace with that. Compliments go to the sweet ones, the warm-skin-and-vanilla ones, the ones that lean across the room at you, basically flirting. Erawan doesn’t flirt. It’s warm, a little plush, and quite pleased with itself, it just isn’t checking whether you approve. How she makes a thing this present and this indifferent at once, I don’t know. But she does.

There’s a whole sport around this now. A perfume gets graded on its sillage, its projection, its longevity, like an athlete: how far it throws, how long it lasts, how many heads it turns in a corridor. Sillage is just the French for the wake a boat drags behind it; the whole point of the word is that people know you passed. Erawan leaves no wake. It’s on me, close, where I can reach it, with nothing to prove to the open-plan office. In a moment when your scent is supposed to be a flex, a thing you broadcast, it’s almost rude how little it cares whether anyone noticed.

What it smells of, if you press me, is contentment. The Italians have the phrase, dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. Some old aristocrat on his own warm hill who never once had to earn his rest because rest is simply the air he was born into. That’s one face. The other is younger: a kid flat on his back in tall grass, a stem in his teeth, sun coming pink through his eyelids, his whole life still ahead and nothing in it yet that needs fixing. The same nothing-wanted, fifty years apart — the man who’s stopped wanting and the child who hasn’t started — and Erawan smells of both at once. Which, given where I came in — grandfather’s soap, lavender in the wardrobe — is probably why it undid me.

I lifted the title, as it happens, from a The Divine Comedy song — Neil Hannon’s narrator can’t abide a horizontal life, so he rises, assumes the perpendicular, makes his complimentary sounds and talks, gloriously, about nothing in particular. Erawan is the opposite and the same: still nothing in particular, only horizontal to the bone, flat in the grass with no intention of getting up for anybody.

It’s stranger to wear than it sounds, because nothing is allowed to want nothing anymore. Even rest has a job now: sleep so you perform, the weekend in service of Monday. And here’s a gold elephant in the grass with no plans whatsoever, and it’s the most relaxing thing I own precisely because it isn’t trying to relax me. It’s not a lavender candle whispering self-care. It just doesn’t want anything, and you can stand next to that for a while.

The other reason, the bitter one, for the nerd: it has a real floor. Oakmoss — the dark, damp, forest-bottom thing that gave the old fougères their depth. Erawan has that dark under the sun. A fougère with an actual bottom to it, these days, is almost a small act of defiance.

And right now especially. It’s brutally hot here — that European-summer heat where you don’t want to do anything at all — and half my perfumes have gone sour on me. Erawan only gets better. Which makes sense: it was a hot-country scent to begin with, jungle grass in the sun; it doesn’t fight the heat, it just lies down in it next to you.

I just like having it on. It’s like spending the day next to someone completely fine — who isn’t doing anything, doesn’t want anything from you, just lies in the warm grass, content — and you come away calmer for having been near. Which is, I suppose, what I was after the whole time I was reading about it from the wrong city. The grass is still warm where the elephant lay down. You could put a stem in your teeth and stay.

Someone I follow took a perfume I love apart the other day. Molecule by molecule, the whole autopsy — this much synthetic, a sneaky overdose of some woody-amber, the iris just a trace of orris holding up a marketing line, the musk the cheap one. Precise. Clever. And I own that perfume. It’s one of my favourite things I own, I adore it. And reading the breakdown I understood I’d never, ever have bought it from those words. The thrill of the autopsy — sure, I get it. I just keep noticing I leave these posts knowing more and wanting less.

First, a word for the poor note pyramid, because lately it’s fashionable to call it a lie, a scam, worthless. And I mean — of course it’s marketing. It was never anything else. Nobody hid that. It’s the brand talking to you, the way a wine label talks, the way a film poster talks, and nobody opens a poster expecting the shooting schedule. The pyramid talks in the only language the nose actually thinks in: violet, rain, leather, smoke. You’ve never once smelled a percentage. Have you? So attacking the pyramid for not being the formula is like attacking a love letter for not being a contract.

Second, it’s not just the pyramid. It’s all of it. The perfumer’s name on the bottle, sold to you as an auteur with a signature and a philosophy. The house legend, the muse, the trip to Grasse. The heavy cap, the serif on the label. All staged. And — the part the debunkers skip — all of it is also just how we’ve always loved anything at all. Take the Turner. We love it partly because it’s a Turner, because of its title, because of the story of him tied to the mast in the storm. Strip a painting of its name, its maker, its myth, and you don’t get something purer. You get something flatter. Context isn’t the lie between you and the art. Context is half of how art gets loved. And that’s the one bit people somehow drop.

Third, the funny part. The people most allergic to the pyramid are usually the most devout about the perfumer’s name. They’ll laugh at bergamot, rose, vetiver as a fairy tale — and then, same breath, go reverent about a great nose’s genius, his hand, his signature, as if he sat alone in a tower and bled the thing out of his soul. But come on. He works for the brand. He’s handed a brief — make it smell expensive but young, a bit like that competitor that’s selling, for a woman twenty-five to forty, has to land on skin in three seconds across a shop floor. He’s handed a budget too, a cost-per-kilo ceiling, and the cheap musk goes in because the cheap musk is what the number allows, not because his soul demanded it. There’s a marketing team in the room. There’s a deadline. There are eight rounds of edits, a version that tested badly with a panel, an accord pulled because it didn’t survive the base. Full creative freedom? Almost never. He’s a contractor working to spec — a brilliant one, and yes it’s a real craft — but it’s the same machine that made the pyramid, just one floor up. They spat out the cheap marketing and swallowed the prestige marketing whole. And felt clever doing it.

And “marketing doesn’t work on me” itself is the funniest line in the whole hobby. Sit with it for a second. Announcing you’re immune to marketing is itself a marketing position — and the most flattering one on the shelf. Not a consumer. A connoisseur. The story didn’t get you, so you bought a better, costlier one: the one where you’re too sharp to be sold to. The molecule has no marketing department. “I can smell the molecule” has a huge one. And what it’s selling is a you.

There’s one move here I can’t get past. Someone calls a clean, transparent perfume “easy” — a watercolour, no skill in it, anyone could. And just like that they’ve turned painting into a difficulty score. Oil is serious. Watercolour is for amateurs. Which is sometimes backwards, by the way — ask anyone who’s actually tried both. Oil you can pile on, scrape back, paint straight over your own mistake until it’s gone. Watercolour you can’t. One wrong stroke and the paper’s dead, no covering it, the white showing through is the bare paper itself. A transparent perfume is exactly that. Nothing to hide behind. Every seam shows, every cheap note shows, the restraint is the whole feat — knowing what to leave out, and then actually leaving it out. That’s not less skill. It’s usually more. But forget even that. Nobody has ever loved a picture for being hard to make. We don’t love a Turner because watercolour was tougher or easier than oil. We don’t stand in front of the cloud counting up the lead white. Knowing the recipe isn’t tasting the dish — you can read the whole list, flour, butter, salt, the gram weights, and you still haven’t eaten a thing. Knowing a song is 120 bpm in D minor isn’t the song, the one that put the hair up on your arm in a car once. It’s all true and it all misses the only thing you came for. Take a watch apart, name every gear — at some point in the taking-apart it stops telling the time. You can only dismantle what’s already dead. And the one thing you walked up to the bottle for is the exact part the tweezers never find.

And that word — amateur. From amare, to love. It just means someone who loves a thing. It only turned sour when the professions showed up and loving wasn’t enough anymore, you needed a certificate too. But perfume expertise is a profession with no profession behind it. No exam. No licence. No board. None of the scaffolding a sommelier stands on. Just self-education, signed off by other self-educated people. A costume of a vocation worn over what was, the whole time, plain love. And the costume can’t do the one thing that actually matters:

Only the amateur can. Take Luca Turin. The man’s a scientist, an actual chemist of smell, he could hand you the molecule and the mechanism stone cold — and yet you can read a whole book of his and never once notice it, you’d swear he was just some obsessive who fell too hard for the stuff. And that’s exactly why people love him. The sincerity. The emotion. The wild, personal verdicts — a perfume gorgeous or an insult, written about like a person he’s in love with or furious at. That’s what sends you to the shop to go and smell it yourself. And it’s the same thing the rest of them hate him for — too subjective, too sloppy, not rigorous enough. But rigour was never the part that made anyone love a perfume. The lover does that. The one prepping the body on the table doesn’t. Dismantling and devotion are two different organs, and the better you get at the first, the quieter the second goes.

And it never ends. That’s the tell. The bar just keeps climbing. Once it was impressive to name the notes. Then everyone could, so it became the molecules. Now half the room knows its Iso E from its Ambroxan, so the frontier moves again — exact percentages, the supplier’s code name for the base. Every new floor calls the one below it naive. There’s no bottom. Or the bottom is a spreadsheet with no perfume left in it. And the same people doing all this will tell you, dead sincere, trust your nose. While smelling entirely with their head, spreadsheet in hand. Trust your nose, they say. And don’t trust it for a second.

And underneath it all, I think, there’s an embarrassment about pleasure. Just liking something feels unserious. A bit juvenile. So we convert it into competence — into something you can rank, something you can defend. You’re not allowed to just love a perfume. You have to prove you understand it. And understanding now means taking it apart.

None of this is me against knowing things. The opposite. The best thing knowledge ever did for me was the afternoon it made me forgive a perfume I hated. Baccarat Rouge 540 — my personal enemy, all medical gauze and blood. Stayed my enemy until I read that the molecule doing that to me, Evernyl, was the cheap workhorse that built a whole era of chypres, that by the seventies had quietly retired the oakmoss it was imitating. The smell didn’t change. I did. The fact didn’t shrink the perfume to its trick. It opened a door behind it, with a whole decade standing in the room. And that’s the only test of knowledge I trust: does it make the circle of what you can love bigger, or smaller? Most of what passes for expertise makes it smaller. A long, well-lit corridor of things you’re now too refined to enjoy.

And that’s what really runs it in the end. Not the molecules, not the materials, not some purer truth. The wanting to be someone who can’t be fooled. Different pretty wrappers, same thing underneath.

Forgive the harsh skepticism. Truly, there’s no nightmare in it for me, no horror. Not in the brands with their pretty triangles. Not in the formula-hunters with their tweezers. Not in the debunkers. Not in me. The pyramid lies and the molecule list tells the truth, and somehow the lie is the more honest of the two, because at least it admits it’s a story. The same fact can be a door or a guillotine — the only thing that decides is the spirit you bring to it. There’s no high without low, no white without black. But the one thing that’s clear right now is the noise of it, the climbing bar, the corridor getting longer. I just want to come out of each bottle with a wider world and not a shorter list. Knowledge was supposed to be a way of loving things more carefully. Anything else is just a more expensive way of being hard to please. Strange time to love a perfume.

My husband fell out of love with painting in a single evening. He read how the old masters get restored, and something in him changed. “You do understand that almost everything we line up to see has been repainted? Varnish stripped, losses filled in, scrubbed down to a color no living eye ever saw. Leonardo’s hand isn’t in there anymore. We queue to admire the restorer.” Then he stopped going to museums.

That same evening I was bent over a parcel of vintages, working open a flacon with a crust welded to the cap, the juice gone the brown of old cognac, a little sediment asleep on the bottom, the label freckled with damp. I put a drop on my wrist and felt his exact feeling, only flipped inside out. He’d been betrayed by the cleanness. I’d been betrayed by the rot.

We all know the statues. White marble, the nobility of pure form, light triumphant over color, the whole of European sculpture rising from that one chaste root — and it’s a lie from the ground up. The gods of antiquity were painted, and painted without shame: scarlet lips, blue irises, gold leaf, a worked pattern running the hem, a fairground carousel where we imagine the hush of the Louvre. The pigment flaked off across a thousand years, the marble stood there naked, somebody influential decided naked was nobler, and we fell in love — all of us — with what was left after the loss. Our entire taste for white is a taste for damage.

And it doesn’t stop at marble. Black-and-white photography comes down the same line. So does every filter that drains the color out of an image to lend it “mood.” Tell a person the Parthenon was once daubed like a circus wagon and watch him flinch — it shouldn’t be that way, his heart simply knows better. The honest, colored original reads as vulgar now; the bleached fragment reads as profound. The error won so completely, and so long ago, that it stopped being an error and became taste. We don’t even remember it was ever otherwise.

We’ve unlearned the difference between a thing and its decay altogether. The crackle of a record is a defect, a fleck of dust in the groove, and we pay extra and call it warmth. Film grain is a failure of light, and we paint it back over spotless digital so the photograph will give off — forgive the word — authenticity. The faded snapshot beats the bright one. Rot became the synonym for soul, in everything, and we go on kneeling to it.

With paintings the swindle runs the other way. The restorer lifts off the soot and the amber varnish and the canvas ignites: depth, transition, a lamp suddenly switched on behind the paint. Anyone who’s met the same Rembrandt in two cities knows the small treachery of it. Here he is, warm, breathing under his patina; there he is, scoured until he glares at you — and the scoured one is the fake. Not Rembrandt. He never painted like that.

(The restorers themselves have been at each other’s throats for generations and still can’t agree what “right” even means. One school takes a canvas down to the ground; another swears the patina is biography and scraping it off is murder. Both are correct, which is the unbearable part. Two lawyers, three opinions, you know.)

Vintage perfume obeys the very same law — we just agree not to say so. We treat the old bottles as benchmarks outside time, untouched, a golden age you’d better hurry and catch before it sells out. I’ve collected them for years and I still reach for a good flacon before I’ve decided to; the hand goes on its own. Nobody passes through this hobby clean — the classics take you down by the ankles. I can still feel my first: a bottle of Mitsouko from the 80s, bought from a collector, my fingers shaking as I lifted it. It smelled the way nothing is allowed to smell anymore — dense, heavy, gloriously out of fashion — and I decided on the spot I’d finally found the real thing. A time machine. A clean wire running straight back to when they still knew how.

Except the classics we’re smelling are not my youth. I never wore them then. I arrived late and were introduced to them already elderly — ten, twenty, thirty years spent in glass, in heat, in light, in some stranger’s cupboard outside Chisinau or outside Lyon. And a perfume at fifty is no longer that perfume. The accents shift, the notes mutate, something walks out of the room and never comes back; the top collapses first, the base swells and goes heavy, the whole balance drifts somewhere the author never planned. A chemist will tell you without flinching: your fragrance is dead, stop cooing over the corpse-bloom. And he’s right, the wretch, in his cold flat way.

But pour three vintage bottles of the same scent and you get three different perfumes — three tempers, three moods, three arguments. Which one is real? The best preserved? The loudest? The one that matches the old advertisement, which was lying too? The perfumer himself, hauled up out of his grave, would fail to recognize half his own children and take it as an insult.

And the long-lived ones aren’t only aged — they’re rewritten. Mitsouko has been alive more than a century, and across that century she’s been revised again and again: oakmoss gets outlawed, so out it comes and the base is rebuilt from scratch; taste softens, so the seventies spoon in extra flowers and comb that bristling peach-and-moss chypre down into something a gentler decade could wear. Jacques Guerlain composed one thing in 1919, and after that other hands took the brush, generation after generation, each correcting toward its own era. So three bottles from three years aren’t three patinas over one canvas. They’re three different canvases — and each of them, afterward, yellowed in its own private way.

Here is where the painting goes through me like a skewer. A restorer at least scrapes back toward the original; he believes there’s one down there and that he’s getting closer. The house is a restorer running in reverse. It doesn’t scrape, it paints over — freshly, to flatter today’s taste — and under the seventies’ paint there’s no 1919 canvas left to reach. It was painted over. The overpainting was painted over again. The original doesn’t exist even in principle: not buried under varnish but erased and re-authored so many times it’s become almost indecent to ask whose hand we’re discussing.

And memory is no help, rather an accomplice. You think you remember how it smelled in ‘95 on your mother, but memory works as a restorer too, touching up, trimming, filling its losses to its own taste, and there’s nothing left to check it against. The original survives neither in the bottle nor in the head.

The crowd, meanwhile, has settled the matter for you in advance. Sniff a current reformulation and the verdict lands instantly — a gelding, a watercolor of a copy, go smell the vintage, that’s where the soul lives. So you go hunting older glass, you break your nose against the darkened juice, you teach yourself to call the sourness “depth” and the muddle “character.” Today’s Chanel No. 5 against No. 5 from the eighties is good for a three-day brawl in any chat room, and the older bottle always wins on points. “It hasn’t turned, it’s opened up,” they tell you with a perfectly straight face. “Your nose just needs breaking in. Be patient.” And you are patient, and one day you really do begin to hear nobility where the vinegar used to be. It never once occurs to you that half of that famous depth is thirty years of oxidation — that the thing on your skin isn’t Guerlain’s intention but what air and time did after he left the room. We wear the patina and call it the soul.

And we pay for it like rent. A lot closes at insane money — top long dead, half the liquid gone to the air, a little silt on the floor of the bottle — and the bidding runs as if the Grail were sloshing inside. The deader, the dearer. It’s the logic of antiques laid over a substance engineered, from day one, to vanish into the air by the nineties. Somehow we’ve learned to sell evaporation.

And here my husband catches up with me again, Leonardo under his arm. They erased the time for him, and the master’s hand still wasn’t underneath. Nobody erased mine, and the patina lies so thick the master’s hand is gone under it anyway. Clean it and you lose him. Let it age and you lose him. The original is out of reach in both directions, and I honestly can’t tell you which loss is more honest.

The niche has gone off like a flare these last twenty years, self-taught makers everywhere. No long climb from junior chemist to house perfumer inside a conglomerate; instead a person falls for scent first, starts blending on the kitchen table, opens a label. Inspired by what? By vintages, which he too smelled already aged, already listing to one side, already nothing like what their authors meant. And he builds a whole world off those warped coordinates, for an audience of maybe one and a half people whose settings are warped to match. Liz Moores at Papillon, Hiram Green — self-taught to the marrow, and they conjure this noble rot so beautifully the whole room goes still. Dark, resinous, mossy, like the old days. Except the old days never smelled like that. That’s how the old days smell after fifty years on a shelf. A whole aesthetic is being born and we’re calling it vintage — not because it reproduces the old formulas (where would you even find them, and where’s the banned oakmoss, the real musk you only get in nightmares) but because it faithfully reproduces the formulas as time deformed them. The beauty of decay, mistaken for the truth, built into a canon. And the canon turns, predictably, and starts taking its revenge on authenticity.

The versions “recreated from the original formula” are exactly the ones the connoisseurs can’t stand. Not the same at all, they say. A completely different reading. Of course it’s a different reading — someone switched the lamp back on inside the canvas, and they’ve grown used to the soot, and they mutter: he never painted it like that. The reconstruction shows the intention honestly, and it loses to the decay, because it was never the intention we fell for. We fell for what became of it.

And the funny part is that the great houses are chasing the same ghost. Modern Mitsouko strains to smell like the Mitsouko of forty years ago; the house reformulates the perfume to resemble its own aged reflection, running after a phantom it produced itself by bottling the thing and leaving it in the light for four decades. The perfumer reduced to running errands for time. Time is the co-author now, and time collects the fee.

There is no past inside a vintage. It evaporated with the top notes in the first few years. Vintage is a genre of the present playing the past. What I’m holding isn’t a time machine but a fragment of one, crusted over with barnacles, and it’s the barnacles I’ve learned to love. There was no golden age when they still knew how. Or there was, and it smelled like something else entirely, and it never reached me.

Is any of this good or bad? I don’t know, and I refuse to close on “and that was the moment it all came clear,” because nothing came clear. Tomorrow I may well open some time-warped bottle, fall for it like a girl, wear it all day and forget every word of this.

What I notice is that I’m cooling. Why, I won’t pretend to know. Maybe I finally got the taste of the distortion itself and it stopped passing for the intention. Maybe I’m just tired of reaching for an original that isn’t there from any angle. Maybe I’ll change my mind; I’m entirely capable of it.

And God knows I’ve earned the right to resent them. For every survivor there are several betrayals — the top note gone to nail varnish, the heart curdled to vinegar, the famed chypre that opened on my wrist like a pear drop rolled too long in a coat pocket, cloudy and sugared, every last bit of its candied transparency gone. You learn to flinch at the word “vintage.” You stop believing the auction photograph, the seller’s “stored upright, away from heat.” You come to hate the whole circus. And then one arrives intact — fifty years old and still standing, the architecture whole, the actual thing the author built — and it opens on the skin and takes you apart, and there you are, weeping over a smear of evaporating liquid like a sentimental fool, ready to do the entire stupid thing again tomorrow.

My husband was disappointed, and he walked out of the museums. Whether I’ll walk out, I have no idea. For now I’m standing here with an open bottle in my hand. It smells wonderful. Of whom — there’s no longer any way to tell.

The mosquitoes came up out of the grass at around nine, and that was the signal for somebody — grandmother, aunt, a neighbor, whoever was nearest — to take your wrist, uncap the bottle with her thumb, and slap cold cologne up the inside of your arm to the elbow. It went on freezing and was gone almost at once, the way alcohol is, leaving a tightness on the skin and a smell that hung around you the rest of the evening like a rumor. It stung in the places you’d already scratched raw. Nobody asked whether you wanted it. You held still, you got doused, and then you were allowed back out into the dark where the biting was.

The bottle said Gvozdika — one Russian word for two different plants, the spice and the flower, though nobody splashing it on was thinking about either. It cost something like thirty kopecks, it stood in every dacha kitchen and every glove compartment in the country, and not one person handling it would have called it perfume. It was equipment, in the same drawer as the iodine and the mosquito coil and the green stuff you painted on scrapes. What it ran on was eugenol — the molecule that makes up most of clove, most of carnation, and a fair part of the smell of a dentist’s chair. The clove tree grows it on purpose, to be left alone: a poison packed into the buds to put off whatever would eat them, and it puts off insects too, which is the whole and only reason it ever ended up on the arms of children at dusk. The plant’s entire chemical sentence, if you let it finish, is some version of go away. And somewhere along the way the same sentence started getting read aloud as come closer.

One of the best of those readings is Hiram Green’s Philtre. To my nose it’s one of the great things of the last ten years — a perfect launch, full stop, I’m not going to be coy about it. And it’s sold to me as a love potion: Tristan and Isolde on the website, carnation introduced as “the flower of love,” a straight-faced instruction to use it carefully. Hiram Green didn’t invent that move; he’s only the newest name on a long list. L’Heure Bleue is carnation under the blue hour; Opium was half built on the stuff; Caron made Poivre and Bellodgia out of it, there’s L’Air du Temps, there’s Lutens’s Vitriol d’Œillet for when you want it furious instead of fond, and there’s Heaven Can Wait — Ellena, for Malle, three hundred euros, a “romantic invitation” — which is, when you get down to it, clove. Half of them have been reformulated into ghosts of themselves by now, or shut up in bell jars, because the molecule turned out to be an allergen and the rules came for it. The flower of love, the funeral flower, the thing the dentist rubs on your gum: one molecule, sold to you as whichever of the three you walked in wanting.

The one that lived on me longest is 1969. It was one of the first niche bottles I ever loved, and I bought it for the peach and the chocolate folded in under everything — that’s honestly all I’ve ever found in it. My husband leans toward my neck and gets a different bottle entirely. “That’s the army bug spray from the base,” he says — the rest-base he used to go to, the stuff they handed out at the door, a whole riverside summer of it coming up off my collarbone. He’s standing somewhere he hasn’t been in years; I’m wearing something I saved up for. And the clove that drags him back there is the part of the bottle I’ve come to need.

In a Substack chat recently someone mentioned they’d asked a gardener which carnation smelled truest — expecting a variety or a house, I assume — and the gardener sent them to the thirty-kopeck cologne, the bug stuff. A man who spends his days with the actual flower, who has its real smell under his nails, pointing them past every bottle with a love story on it and toward the drugstore tin.

So I went to read what other people get out of it, and I could not believe it: they hear notes. They sit down in front of the thing and take it to pieces — carnation, clove, a bit of pepper, rose, a green stem — and lay the parts out in a row. It was unhinged to read. Like walking in on someone doing a serious tasting of mouthwash: swirl, frown, reach for the word. The Russian-language pages don’t have a single note on them. They’ve got the lake at a workers’ rest-home, an open-air cinema with the reel slipping, a particular August, a specific evening the person is plainly still sitting inside. Mine are the same. I went looking for the notes in myself and there was no room — the whole space was already taken up with dusk and cut grass and a stranger’s hand closing on my wrist.

But the notes they’re so busy naming aren’t the flower either. A carnation — the kind in the bucket at the petrol station — mostly doesn’t smell. They bred the scent out of it decades ago, swapped it for stems that travel well and stand up in a vase for a week; the flower you can actually buy is, more or less, mute. The ones with no smell at all are the ones men used to put in their lapels. So whatever those reviewers are pulling apart, it isn’t a Dianthus. What they call carnation is eugenol, which is clove, which in the bottle is nearly always synthetic — the flower itself contributes about nothing. A whole tasting table, frowning seriously over a smell with no flower behind it.

Which the language half-owns up to. Clove got the name first — caryophyllus, the carnation tree, the spice — and the flower borrowed it later, on the grounds of smelling roughly the same; eugenol is named after clove’s old genus, for God’s sake. English then pried the two back apart, clove and carnation, two words for something the nose has never once managed to separate. Russian didn’t bother: gvozdika is both, spice and flower, one word telling the truth. The cologne on my arm was a flower that was mostly a spice that was mostly a molecule, and nobody anywhere in that chain was lying. They just kept passing the name down the line.

As for why the whole thing reads like something your great-aunt kept on her dresser — that was settled before any chemist touched it. Carnation didn’t get banned out of perfume; it got retired, the same decade the boutonnière did. There was a long stretch — Belle Époque to the 1950s — when a man fixed a fresh carnation in his buttonhole the way he strapped on his watch; Cary Grant did it, Gable did it, and it meant you were dressed. Then the sixties came, men quit wearing flowers, the everyday suit went with them, and the carnation lost the one place it had a job. After that it slid fast — off the dandy’s lapel into the bucket at the petrol station, from the prized garden clove-pink to the wreath on a grave. It didn’t help that the flower meant too much, and most of it dated: Wilde’s green one a coded confession, the red one a revolutionary badge, the white one plain conservative respectability. A bloom carrying that much eventually just reads as a while ago. Meanwhile perfume turned green, then turned clean, and anything warm and spicy and powdery started reading as a dowager. Eugenol got restricted decades after all this and bolted the door, but the flower was already gone. It’s a formal smell, and we stopped being formal. That’s most of it.

So I own one of the best perfumes of the decade, and I own a bottle of bug repellent, and it’s the same bottle. Whether I love how it smells or only love what it keeps opening — the grass, the dark, somebody’s hand on my wrist — I’ve decided not to check. You check by taking the thing apart, and there is nothing in there to take apart. There’s an evening.

I put it on and go out into the evening. To the mosquitoes, apparently, I’m still saying no.

Stora Skuggan samples arrived through a chain I’ll mention once and drop — my friend’s partner is the cousin of someone close to the founders, and she doesn’t post sample sets idly. Three vials, no marketing copy in the envelope, which spared me the website until after I’d worn them. I started with Silphium because it’s green and I love green, the kind you can press your face into the way a horse presses its face into a spring meadow, eyes half shut, just breathing in. Modern materials, no naturalist piety about wet stalks, but the green holds — properly green, sincerely green, with that bitter umbelliferous edge fennel cousins always carry and a low warmth of leather and incense underneath that keeps it from going salad. I wore it three days before bothering with the website, and when I read about the Romans eating the plant to extinction in the first century, the most expensive spice in the world reconstructed from molecular fragments and surviving relatives, the story was a coat I could take or leave. The perfume was already standing without it, which is more than can be said for most concept-heavy niche these days, and which should have warned me about the other two.

Fantôme is the trouble. On me it reads as a botanical-vegetable compote — ivy, crushed green bean pods, a flicker of garden peas, sweetened stems, the occasional small flower drifting through, a soft sweet musk holding the bottom. It’s not unpleasant. It’s also genuinely puzzling, in a way I’ve been turning over for weeks now without quite resolving, and I think the puzzle is the materials. There’s something in the modern molecules they’re using that won’t behave like the picture seems to be asking it to behave. The vegetal register is doing its thing, I can read it cleanly, and yet the perfume keeps not arriving. It hovers. It declines to settle into either the green-pastoral mode or the synthetic-modern mode and instead does something stranger, holding both at once and refusing to commit. I’ve been wearing it on and off and I still don’t know if I like it. I know I can’t put it down, which I think is a different state.

The website tells me Fantôme is about Le Loyon, a real figure seen for years wandering the woods around Maules in French-speaking Switzerland, two metres tall, dressed in camouflage and an obsolete gas mask, who picks wildflowers and disappears at the snap of a twig. He has not, to anyone’s knowledge, ever explained himself. The brand text closes with a line that does more work than it looks like it’s doing — the modern world is alight with information and the shadows are shrinking; it is rare to come across someone who doesn’t feel it is necessary to explain himself. I keep returning to that sentence because the perfume behaves the same way the man behaves. It refuses to become legible on demand, refuses to deliver a tidy arc from top to base, won’t tell me whether the modern molecules and the green stems are antagonists or partners. I started suspecting, around the third week, that this is the actual project of the house, and that Le Loyon is a clue rather than a marketing flourish.

Because look at what they choose. Fantôme is built around a man no one can identify. Silphium is built around a plant that no longer exists. Azalai, the third sample, is built around a tree that was killed in 1973 by a drunk lorry driver asleep at the wheel. Look at the rest of the line: Hexensalbe is built around the witches’ flying ointment of medieval Europe, and the actual point of the brand text — under the broomstick joke and the hallucinogen lore — is that female sexuality has been the most thoroughly suppressed creature in the cabinet for six centuries. Mistpouffer is built around an unexplained sound, recorded over fog-covered lakes for centuries, that science still cannot account for and that the Haudenosaunee believed was the Great Spirit going on with his work of shaping the earth. There’s a pattern, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. This house makes perfumes about subjects the official picture of the world cannot fit inside it. Ghosts, dead trees, extinct plants, suppressed sexualities, sounds without sources. Creatures without a category. Each fragrance is an offering placed in front of one of these figures, and none of them — this is the crucial bit — are asked to resolve. The perfumes don’t translate the creatures into something we already know. They put them on the skin in their own grammar, leave them strange, and walk away.

Which is what makes Stora Skuggan, to my ear, the first Swedish house with an indigenous voice rather than an export voice. To see what I mean, look at the most interesting Swedish-perfumery event of the last few years, which is the Acne Studios collaboration with Frédéric Malle in 2024. Suzy Le Helley wrote it — a young perfumer, classical training, the kind of nose Malle likes to back — and what she produced is a neoclassical aldehydic floral. A generous dose of aldehydes up top, rose, violet, a touch of orange blossom, a peach-and-vanilla heart, sandalwood, a thread of frankincense, a sea of white musks underneath. On skin the first minute is old French luxury, black silk and a powdered shoulder, and within ten minutes it has dissolved into something that smells like a very expensive bar of soap. This is not a flaw, it’s the whole concept — luxury collapsed into utility, utility raised to luxury, the cashmere jumper with the deliberate hole. Conceptually, it’s clever. The trouble, for our purposes, is that the French side leads. The composition is French, the technique is French, the lineage is French — Le Helley is writing in the great tradition of Chanel No 5 and everything that flowed from it. The Swedish side acts as filter, editor, tonal correction. It’s Sweden translated into French, which is a perfectly respectable thing to do, but it’s not the same as speaking Swedish. There’s a Neil Hannon song called Sweden that does a similar manoeuvre in pop — tall and strong and blonde and blue eyed, pure and healthy, very wealthy — assembling Sweden out of its own export catalogue, with Bergman and Ibsen (who is Norwegian, but Hannon doesn’t care) and Karin Larsson and Nina Persson lined up as gentle props. The song is funny precisely because it knows it is doing this. Acne × Malle does the same, with somewhat less self-awareness. Stora Skuggan are the only Swedes I’ve encountered in perfumery who decline to do it at all.

The closest cultural neighbour I can find for them is not in perfumery, where I’ve been looking, but in music — AURORA, the Norwegian singer, whose lyrical subject is almost never a person in the romantic sense. It’s a child of the woods, a last girl, a half-creature, something that sounds like it has always been there and like nobody has ever heard it before. Listen to Runaway, The Seed, A Different Kind of Human with three of these perfumes nearby and the family resemblance is almost embarrassing. Both are doing what I’ve started thinking of as a post-anthropocentric folk — a new folklore in which the human is no longer the centre, but in which there is also no apocalyptic register, no eco-grief, no lecture, just a quiet shift of optic. The forest, the tree, the witch, the ghost return as full interlocutors. This isn’t random. Scandinavia is the only part of Europe that has kept a serious living thread of pre-Christian animism — Sámi cosmology, Icelandic folk law that takes elves into account in road planning, the whole quiet undertow that the export image carefully edits out. AURORA picks it up. Stora Skuggan pick it up. Byredo, characteristically, do not.

I should say where I’m writing from, because it changes what these perfumes are doing to me. I live in Moldova, on a kind of cultural edge — Romanian and Russian, with French music going back to my teens and a nose trained on the French and Italian schools. The nature-as-beauty tradition is mine; I grew up inside it. When I encounter Stora Skuggan, I am not encountering my own animism returning. I’m encountering someone else’s, which happens to rhyme with the one my grandmother’s neighbours in their villages still half-believe in — the forest is alive, the well has a temper, the dead are not exactly gone — but turned at a different angle and dressed in different clothes. That rhyme is what stayed with me. Not recognition, exactly. Something more like a relative I’d never met.

A word about Azalai before I close, because I owe it one. Warm amber, modern but unsurprising, broadly in the family of the orientalist Lutens — Ambre Sultan with the gravitas turned down. Saffron, blood orange, that velvione musk which is supposedly meant to evoke the skin of a newborn’s scalp (a sentence I would not have written but which is, irritatingly, accurate), gum acacia syrup, a salt-amber bottom, the briefest brush of mint tea. Pleasant. Wearable. Not the reason to bother with this house. The reason, I keep coming back to, is the man in the gas mask.

Because here is what I’ve been dancing around for two thousand words. Le Loyon picks wildflowers in a Swiss forest in an obsolete gas mask, and the website asks who he is, and whether he is even human, and answers — courteously, almost unfashionably — that we will not be told. He just likes smelling flowers. That is, in the end, everything we know about him. And the longer I wear Fantôme the more I suspect the trick of the whole house is that this figure is not a character in their cabinet of curiosities but a self-portrait, and not only of the brand. Look at us. Look at me, for weeks deep in a sample I cannot decide about, sniffing my own wrist in the kitchen at seven in the morning, trying to identify a green that won’t behave. Look at anyone who reads to the end of a perfume essay. We are a small, slightly ridiculous tribe of people who have made a private discipline out of pressing our faces into things and inhaling, and we do it with the same patient, slightly cracked seriousness as a two-metre figure in camouflage and a respirator picking hyacinths in a wood near Maules. He is not the strange one. He is the only one in the picture who has noticed the hyacinths. The strangeness is that the rest of the world has agreed to find this strange. Stora Skuggan, alone among the Swedish houses I’ve tried, seem to know whose side they’re on, and in a small but genuine way that’s enough to make me forgive the difficult materials, the green-bean compote, the weeks of not being sure. He just likes smelling flowers. So do I.

They met at a scent gallery, which is the kind of detail you couldn’t invent — New York, 2024, Sean Raspet showing molecules nobody had ever smelled and Laura Sisson building the models that teach a machine how a nose learns, the two of them circling the same obsession from opposite sides of it. And the obsession, it turns out, isn’t each other. It’s smell, and what they want is to catch it before it gets away.

Their company, Patina, has two million dollars now to build what they’re calling the first universal code of smell and taste — a model, Sense1, that copies the receptors in your nose so that any odor can be taken apart and put back together from its primaries. Raspet has a name for where this goes: a Pantone for scent. That flat indexable certainty that color got decades ago, finally arriving for the one sense that never let itself be pinned.

I keep wanting to be excited, and partly I am, but there’s a line in how they talk about it that I return to the way you return to a note that’s slightly off in something you otherwise love — the idea that the old language, all those florals and woods and ambers we’ve leaned on for a century, is a problem. Because it’s imprecise. Because it slips around between one nose and the next, one language and another.

It does slip. They’re right about that much. I’m just not sure the slipping is the flaw they think it is.

The bug they want to fix

I wrote a couple of months ago that perfume is the only thing I know of where the subject of your expertise simply disappears while you’re looking at it — you can’t screenshot a smell, can’t send someone the link, can’t even really describe it without robbing the other senses for words. Writing fiction about chemistry, I called it, and I meant it kindly. The vanishing wasn’t the catch. It was the whole reason the thing was worth doing.

Patina’s two million says the opposite. The vanishing is exactly the catch, and they’re going to fix it.

The inefficiency, the way they lay it out, and they lay it out well: a perfumer says rose and no two people hear the same word. The rose in Grasse, the rose in Isparta, the rose in the hallway of a house you haven’t stood in for thirty years — different things, all of them, wearing one word. And it goes deeper than slipperiness between two people; whole languages carve the smell-world up differently, some hunter-gatherer tongues holding a dozen abstract odor terms where English speakers grope around and end up naming the source instead of the smell. A Romanian trandafir and an English rose aren’t quite pointing at the same ghost. So the words can’t be the foundation, they argue — too soft, too local, too cultural. The receptors can. Four hundred of them, firing in patterns, underneath language and shared across everyone who has a nose. Go down to that level and the fog burns off. You stop describing and start specifying.

Clean. I keep turning it over and it stays clean, and I still think it’s the wrong tool aimed at the right thing. Because the softness in scent language was never sloppiness waiting for someone competent to come along. The reason rose stays vague is that it has to carry your rose and mine at the same time — the stranger’s perfume on the train, the hallway thirty years back, all of it at once. The word is doing the work of memory, not measurement. A receptor map will tell you the molecule down to the last bond and have nothing whatever to say about whose ghost walks in with it.

And here’s the strange thing: they already know this, they just file it under the old problem instead of the new one. There’s a line in their whitepaper, aimed at the models that came before them, that predicting what something smells like without understanding why is like translating a poem word by word from a language you don’t speak — the text looks right, the meaning is gone. It’s a beautiful line and it’s exactly correct, and I don’t think they’ve noticed it doesn’t stop where they stopped it. A receptor map is a finer dictionary, that’s all. It translates the words more accurately than anything before it. It still can’t translate the poem, because the poem was never in the words.

Which brings me to Roudnitska, who should have been on their side and wouldn’t have been. The man studied smell the way Darwin studied beetles, years of it, trying to drag perfumery into something you could teach and write down and pass on — closer to a real grammar of scent than anyone before or since. He wanted the system. And then he turns around and says a beautiful perfume is the one that gives you a shock, sensory first and then, a beat later, psychological. A whole life of apparatus, built to deliver the one thing the apparatus couldn’t hold. He’d have understood Sense1 to the bone — and he’d have hated what they want to do with it. He spent ninety years chasing a smell that jolts you and then leaves, and they want to pin the butterfly to the board and say, look, here it is, it isn’t going anywhere. As if that were a smell. As if a thing that can’t leave you could ever shock you.

How it works, and why now

Strip the manifesto off and what’s underneath is concrete enough. Almost every scent molecule in the things you buy comes out of a handful of specialised labs, who sell up the chain to the fragrance houses, who turn it into a perfume or a candle or the cherry note in cough syrup. That arrangement has barely moved in fifty years, and inventing a genuinely new molecule used to be a multi-year project only the giants could afford.

Sense1 is the engine for that. It models the nose’s four hundred receptors and predicts which ones a molecule will fire, and how hard, before anyone’s gone to the trouble of making it — and then maps those firings back to something you’d recognise as a smell. Predict the receptors, predict the perception. From there the promises fan out: faithful copies of natural materials that synthetics have never quite caught, and scent built to order, composed to spec the way you’d mix a colour or program a synth. Design the sensation you want and work backwards to the molecule. That last part is the one that should make a perfumer sit up, and not entirely with pleasure.

The why-now is the part I keep chewing on, because “the tech finally caught up” is true and tells you almost nothing. What actually moved is that you can now guess at the receptors in software instead of finding out in a wet lab, molecule by expensive molecule. Cheaper prediction, faster screening. And once the guessing gets cheap enough, the thing stops being something only scale can buy — a small house could in principle reach for materials that used to take a giant’s budget to develop. That’s the shift, not the molecules themselves. And it points somewhere most of the writing about Patina hasn’t bothered to go.

Who actually holds the palette

Patina isn’t really a perfume company, whatever the gallery opening suggested. It’s building the floor that perfume stands on — the underlying intelligence layer, Raspet’s words, and that phrase is the whole game. They don’t want to make you a beautiful thing. They want to be the system the beautiful thing gets made against.

Which would land harder if that floor had ever belonged to the people standing on it. It hasn’t, not once. The romance of the independent house is mostly romance. Givaudan goes back to 1895, Roure further still — older than nearly every heritage maison that now waves its tradition at the labs like a cross at a vampire. The famous in-house perfumer was, more often than the bottle would like you to know, a creative director nodding at work whose real authors never got their names on anything. And the old houses didn’t die in the back half of the century because somebody made a better perfume — they got outspent by fashion brands who’d worked out that a bottle was the cheapest way to let you touch couture, and who could only make the stuff at all because the giants were mixing it for them the whole time. The palette has changed hands before. It has just never once sat in the hand holding the bottle.

So when Patina turns to a small house and offers it a signature molecule of its own, something patentable, I’d listen in a longer key. The law lets you patent a molecule and not a formula, sure, and cheap molecular design could in theory hand some tiny perfumer a material no giant is allowed to copy. But the patent is also the exact thing that chains a brand to its supplier — you can’t pick up your own bestseller and walk. A layer that makes proprietary materials cheap to spin up doesn’t set anyone free. It just moves a new landlord into the palette, one who answers his email faster and talks in model weights, but a landlord, collecting rent on the thing you thought you owned. The brands that actually got free got free on distribution — on owning the road to your nose — and not on owning a molecule.

The rose without the rose

One of the headline promises is rose oil rebuilt at the biological level — the smell of the material without a single petal coming off a plant. There’s a real case here, no sentiment required. Natural rose oil eats resources alive; thousands of flowers for a few grams of it. As the climate squeezes the naturals tighter and pushes the prices up, a copy that reads as rose while drinking a fraction of the water and skipping the petrochemicals isn’t some cynical swap. It might be the decent thing to do. And it’s harder than it sounds — by their own count rose oil runs to more than three hundred components, and they admit, plainly, that no synthetic reconstruction has ever matched it. Rose is not a note. It’s a crowd.

So I won’t sit here and tell you naturals are honest and synthetics are fakes — half the masterpieces you’d die for are built on synthetics, and the rose in them never grew anywhere. The question that actually interests me isn’t natural against synthetic at all. It’s what the word honest is even supposed to mean once the copy is, molecule for molecule, the thing it copied.

Because this is the part that sits oddly with me. A rose rebuilt at the receptor level so faithfully that the nose, which was the only judge this ever had, can’t find grounds to object. The rose without the rose, and nothing left in your own face to tell you which one you’ve got. And right there the realness we’ve always paid extra for stops living in the smell and goes to live in the story printed on the box. Patina doesn’t kill that difference. It moves it out of the bottle and into the copywriting, where it was always half-living anyway.

What goes when smell gets legible

So back to the receptor map, and what it can hold and what runs straight through its fingers.

A receptor map is a model of a universal nose. There’s never been a universal nose. Maurice Roucel will tell you flat out that he can’t smell Galaxolide, one of the most everywhere musks in the business, and it never cost him a thing — because the craft was always about working around the particular instrument you got stuck with, knowing where your own nose goes deaf and correcting for it the way you’d correct for anything you’d lived inside for forty years. Sense1 is a nose nobody has. It can give you back rose oil. It can’t give you back Le Parfum de Thérèse — the one Roudnitska kept out of production for years, the one only his wife was allowed to wear — because that perfume was never just its molecules. It was the way it turned on one particular wrist on one particular afternoon, the ghost that wanders in uninvited halfway down the drydown, the part that was always happening in the person and never in the glass.

This is what the older piece leaves sitting on the table for this one. I argued back then that authority in fragrance can’t be your credentials or your follower count, only presence — being there when the evidence walks out the door. You couldn’t fake having stood in the room, because the room emptied itself and left nothing behind but your own words for proof.

What Patina is really selling, under the molecule and the cheaper rose, is a world where the room stops emptying. Where you can screenshot the smell, link it, file it, keep it still on a shelf. And I genuinely don’t know what happens to presence in a world like that — whether standing in the room still counts for anything once the thing in the room has stopped insisting on leaving. Maybe it counts for more, the last scrap nobody’s automated. Maybe it just stops counting, the way handwriting stopped, kept on for sentiment and practiced by hobbyists at fairs.

The open part

A Pantone for smell gets built, or most of it does. They’re honest about where they are: three steps along a road of four, and the last step — how all those receptors firing at once actually add up to a perception, how they shout over and cancel each other in a real mixture — they call the grand challenge, and it’s still ahead of them. Which is to say the easy part is the molecule and the hard part is the experience, and they know it. But the money’s pointed one direction and water runs downhill. Whether was never really the question. The question is what we’ll agree to call translatable — and what we’ll go on insisting is lost in the translation, on purpose, because the loss was where the meaning lived.

Colour came through its Pantone fine. Nobody’s ever held up swatch 18-3838 and mistaken it for an actual sunset, or wanted to. The number made things matchable without anyone deciding the swatch was the truth of the colour. Maybe smell does the same — takes its index, keeps its mystery, the code a tool and not a verdict on what the thing really is.

Or maybe smell is the one that won’t, because smell was always the sense that refused to sit still, and the refusing was the whole gift. I wrote two months ago that the least we can ask of each other, in a field where the evidence goes up into thin air, is to be there when it does. I keep turning over what we’ll ask of each other once it doesn’t — once the thing finally agrees to stay in the room, and we get to find out whether we ever actually wanted it to.

That’s it. That’s the starting kit.

But here’s what nobody tells you — passion alone won’t get you there. Not even close.

In today’s rapidly evolving fragrance landscape, standing out requires more than a good nose. It requires strategy. It requires intentionality. It requires a willingness to show up — day after day — even when no one is watching.

Especially when no one is watching.

I’ve been on this journey for a while now. And I’ve made every mistake in the book so you don’t have to.

Here’s everything I’ve learned on my journey. And I truly hope it serves you on yours.

1. Find Your Niche (But Make It Broad)

This is non-negotiable.

Are you the cozy scents girl? The niche-only purist? The guy who pairs fragrances with sneakers — based purely on vibes?

Pick a lane.

Then post about everything anyway — because here’s the truth nobody wants to hear: the algorithm doesn’t care about your lane. It cares about volume. It cares about consistency. It cares about you showing up.

Your niche isn’t a boundary. It’s a permission structure. A north star. An aesthetic anchor that grounds your personal brand in something bigger than yourself — while still leaving room for growth.

The anchor doesn’t need to touch the ocean floor. It just needs to look good in your bio.

2. Develop a Signature Format

This is where most creators get it wrong.

Text slides. Bold sans-serif font. White background. A provocative statement in all caps at the top — and a quiet, almost confessional “let’s be honest...” in lowercase italics at the bottom.

That’s it. That’s the format.

“YOU DON’T HAVE A FRAGRANCE COLLECTION. YOU HAVE AN EMOTIONAL COPING MECHANISM.”

Does it need to be true? No. Does it need to be original? No. Does it need to be loud?

Absolutely.

The key isn’t the message. It’s the conviction. And the font size.

3. Master the Core Vocabulary

There are roughly eleven words that power the entire fragrance content ecosystem. Let me say that again — eleven words:

That’s it. That’s the lexicon.

And here’s the beautiful part — they can be recombined in virtually infinite configurations. “This versatile beast with sophisticated DNA” is not the same sentence as “a sophisticated compliment getter with beastly aura.”

The possibilities aren’t just numerous — they’re limitless. And limitless possibilities are — if you really think about it — the most versatile beast mode of all.

4. Create Relatable Content About Overconsumption

Your audience doesn’t want advice.

They want to feel seen.

Post about your “no-buy month” that lasted six days. Share a photo of seventeen packages with a crying-laughing emoji and the caption: “I have no self-control and I’m not even sorry 😂😭”

Make a reel. “POV: you said you’d only get a sample.” Trending audio. Quick cuts. Done.

This content works because it takes the viewer’s overconsumption and reframes it as a personality trait. Not a problem — a quirk. Not an expense — a love language.

Never — and I mean never — suggest they might simply buy less.

Unless you want to pivot to the exact opposite. In which case — make a nine-slide carousel telling them they have a self-control problem. Be prescriptive. Be stern. Tell them sampling is just pre-shopping. Tell them they’re chasing a feeling, not a fragrance.

Both approaches work equally well.

The key isn’t the message. It’s the conviction. And — again — the font size.

5. Have Strong Opinions About Things That Don’t Require Opinions

These aren’t analyses. They’re not critiques. They’re not even arguments.

They’re hooks.

You don’t need to actually say anything — you just need a confident opening and a comment section full of people arguing with each other. That’s not conflict. That’s community building.

The difference between conflict and community building is whether you’re the one moderating it. If yes — community. If no — drama. It’s that simple.

6. Review Fragrances You’ve Worn for Fifteen Minutes

Here’s a hard truth that most people aren’t ready to hear:

Time is content.

You cannot — you should not — sit with a fragrance for an entire day. Not when you could be filming. Not when you could be posting. Not when the algorithm is waiting.

Spray. React. Film the reaction. Post.

If the dry-down turns out to be something completely different — congratulations. That’s not a mistake. That’s a second piece of content.

Some call it rushing. I call it multiplying touchpoints across the consumer journey. Same thing, really. But one of them sounds like a strategy.

7. Use AI — But Use It Wisely

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment.

Writing is hard. Really hard. You didn’t get into this to stare at a blank screen. You got into this because you love smelling things — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

A well-crafted prompt can generate a perfectly serviceable review in under thirty seconds:

“Write a poetic, evocative fragrance review of a warm amber scent with vanilla and sandalwood. Tone: nostalgic yet sensual. Include a vivid memory about autumn and a reference to cashmere.”

Will anyone notice? Of course they’ll notice. It reads like a Hallmark card that’s been microdosed. But here’s the thing — so does everyone else’s. You’re not competing with humans anymore. You’re competing with other people’s prompts. And frankly, your prompt is better. You specified cashmere.

That’s not cheating. That’s leveraging the tools available to you. There’s a meaningful difference between the two — and the sooner you internalize it, the sooner you can focus on what truly matters.

Which is showing up. It’s always showing up.

8. Cultivate Brand Relationships

Let’s not pretend.

The endgame — for most of us — is PR packages. Free fragrance in exchange for visibility. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it requires discipline.

Tag brands. Use their hashtags. Engage with their content. And — I cannot stress this enough — never post a negative review of anything sent to you for free.

If a fragrance is terrible — and some will be — simply don’t mention it. Archive it. Move on. Protect the relationship.

This isn’t dishonesty. This is relationship management. These are not the same thing. One is a character flaw. The other is a LinkedIn skill.

9. Engage With the Community — Strategically

Comment on bigger creators’ posts.

Not because you care about what they said — let’s be real about that — but because their followers will see your profile.

You haven't read the posts. You don't need to. Nobody reads the posts. We are all looking at each other's follower counts and calculating whether a collab would be mutually beneficial. This is called community and it is sacred.

“This is SO beautifully written 🔥🙌” under forty posts a day is not desperation.

It’s a touchpoint. A micro-interaction. A brand impression at scale.

Three words that mean the same thing as “desperate,” but with better margins.

10. Make Seasonal Content on a Strict Schedule

“Top 10 Fall Fragrances” goes up in August. “Summer Scents You NEED” drops in April. “Cozy Winter Picks” — October, no later.

The list should be approximately 70% identical to last year’s list — with two or three new additions to signal freshness.

Nobody checks. Nobody compares. Nobody remembers.

And if someone does check?

That’s engagement. And engagement — as we’ve established — is everything. Even the kind that comes from someone publicly proving you’re a fraud. Especially that kind, actually. It’s very shareable.

11. Have the Correct Opinion About Classics

This is where it gets nuanced — but stay with me.

Classics exist to be referenced. Not worn — referenced. You need to have mentioned Shalimar, Mitsouko, and No. 5 in your first twenty posts. This establishes credibility. It signals depth. It tells the audience: I didn’t just arrive — I’ve been on a journey.

Whether you’ve actually smelled them is — and I want to be careful with how I phrase this — not strictly necessary.

If you have — great. Say they “fundamentally changed your understanding of perfumery.” If you haven’t — also great. Say they “fundamentally changed your understanding of perfumery.” Nobody will follow up. Nobody ever follows up. Following up is not a content format.

For current releases — the opposite rules apply. You must have an opinion within forty-eight hours of launch. The opinion doesn’t need to be informed. It needs to be first.

“Just tested the new [house] [name] and... wow. Just wow. This one is going to be polarizing.“

That’s a review. You’re done. Polarizing means you don’t have to say whether it’s good. Add a fire emoji and move on. There will be another launch tomorrow. There are always more.

12. Describe Every Scent as a Journey

Never say “it smells like lemons.”

That’s information. Information is not content.

Say: “it opens with a luminous burst of sun-drenched citrus — almost electric in its intensity — that gently, almost reluctantly, gives way to a creamy, ethereal heart before settling into a warm embrace of skin and memory.”

One is a fact. The other is a narrative. And narratives — as any content strategist will tell you — convert.

If that sounds like it was generated by a language model: correct. But also — is there a difference anymore? Between a person who has internalized the cadences of AI-generated prose and an AI that has been trained on human prose? Are we not all, in some sense, large language models, predicting the next word based on everything we’ve ever consumed?

No. We’re not. That was a stupid thing to say. But it would make an excellent carousel.

13. Reference the Community Constantly

Say it with warmth. Say it with ownership. Say it like it’s a family you chose — a space where you finally feel seen.

Periodically post about how “this community has given me so much.” About how “the connections I’ve made through fragrance are truly priceless.” About how “I never expected a hobby to change my life like this.”

This works best when posted from the same account where you are also executing tips 8 and 9.

The cognitive dissonance is not a bug.

It’s the infrastructure.

14. If You’re From Eastern Europe, There Is an Alternative Path

Everything I’ve described so far is the Western model. Upbeat. Relatable. Engagement-driven. Lots of emojis. Lots of “I’d love to hear your thoughts 👇.” Lots of showing up.

But there is another way.

If you’re from Eastern Europe — and specifically if you came to fragrance through Soviet-era perfumery discourse, Krasnaya Moskva, and a general conviction that most people haven’t earned the right to an opinion — you can skip all of the above and simply be an authority.

The format is different. No reels. No trending audio. No carousel slides. Instead — long, authoritative posts written in the tone of a vice-principal who has caught you running in the corridor. Again.

The key is to treat every interaction as though someone has interrupted your very important work with a very stupid question:

— “What do you think about the new Dior release?” — “I think you need to develop an understanding of the old releases first. And then — maybe — we can have this conversation.”

— “I like Montale Vanilla Coffee, could you recommend something similar?” — (sigh, removes glasses, pinches bridge of nose) “We have discussed this. Repeatedly. Reread my post from March 14th. Then the one from June 7th. Then think. Then reread them again. Then — perhaps — I will speak with you.”

— “I bought this on your recommendation and didn’t like it...” — “Then you applied it incorrectly. Or smelled it incorrectly. Or your mood was wrong. In any case — the problem is not my recommendation.”

— “Can I ask a silly question?” — “You already have.”

The questions are always innocent. The answers are always as though someone has dared to address a cardiac surgeon mid-operation. About a mole.

This approach will not get you brand deals. It will not get you PR packages. It will get you a small, devoted, slightly terrified following that wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with you — not because you’re right, but because the last person who tried received a four-paragraph reply with citations and a concluding remark about “the general decline of olfactory culture.”

It’s niche. But it works.

And honestly — between the vice-principal and the person posting “just vibes 🤍✨” — I’m not sure which one is more unhinged. They’re just unhinged in different fonts.

15. Above All — Be Authentic

This is the most important tip. And I’ve saved it for last for a reason.

At the end of the day — and I truly, deeply cannot emphasize this enough — people don’t connect with content.

They connect with people.

They want you. Your story. Your journey. Your truth. Your deeply personal, vulnerable, radically honest connection to the art of fragrance.

That’s what sets you apart. That’s what makes you irreplaceable. That’s what no algorithm can replicate — and no AI can replace.

And if you don’t have that connection yet?

Don’t worry.

There are tools that can help you craft one in under sixty seconds.

Just remember to delete “Sure! Here’s a deeply personal fragrance story:” from the top before you paste it in.

This post was written with intentionality, passion, and a deep commitment to showing up authentically in the fragrance content space.

It was also written by a human — though in today’s rapidly evolving landscape, that distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to —

Okay. I’ll stop.

But will the content?

In a world where everyone has a voice, perhaps the most radical act is simply —

No. I’m actually stopping now.

🤍✨

And besides — it’s a chypre. Chypres in fragrance discourse have long been classified as the adult scent. Not teenage, not sweet, not floral, not morning. The chypre is the perfume of a woman who knows herself. They literally write that on perfume websites. The archetype: thirty-five plus, sophisticated, mature, ambitious, exquisitely groomed. Marlene Dietrich stubbing out a cigarette in a black-and-white frame. Lauren Bacall whistling. Greta Garbo, divine, exquise et chagrine, the way Mylène Farmer sang her in 1986 — baisers froids comme elle. Cold kisses, beautiful and orphaned and ruined. The 1930s, heavy lipstick, dense wool, suede, cashmere. The chypre feeds the mind, not the body. It’s for those who take life seriously. The chypre is jolie laide — it doesn’t try to please you, it isn’t cozy-sexy, it’s haughty-sexy. It’s for black tie, for evening, for cold months, for special occasions. And at its base sits, mandatorily, melancholy — depths and shadows, a whisper of mystery, the kind of riddle that’s only handed to those who have lived through something.

It’s a remarkably stable portrait, and it crystallized largely around Mitsouko in 1919 — postwar Europe, a woman who had lost, sadness as background, oakmoss as autumn. Mitsouko set the tone, and the whole chypre family lived inside that tone for the next century. Femme, Miss Dior, Cabochard, Aramis, Bandit — all read through the same frame. Oakmoss automatically means the past. Leather means memory. Animalics mean something that’s gone. A chypre is about what was.

I love chypres. Half my shelf is chypres. And I live with one inconvenient observation.

I don’t smell any of that in them.

And it’s most acute with Diorama.

I’ve worn her for years. I have an old bottle, pre-reformulation, the one that still has the prunol and the caraway and the full animal underbelly that Demachy removed in 2010. And every time I put her on I don’t catch a single mushroom.

No autumn. No decay. Not a single trace of melancholy.

I smell mid-May.

Specifically: walnut catkins in puddles after a night of rain. Heavy, fleshy, caterpillar-like, beginning to rot. There are different kinds of catkins — birch, poplar, oak, each tree has its own window between April and June. But walnut ones are the most fleshy, and when they fall into a puddle and start fermenting, they release this sweetish-bitter, faintly animal smell that I have never encountered anywhere else. Except in Diorama.

And around those catkins — the entire courtyard of my Chișinău childhood in mid-May. Jasmine in the neighbours’ front garden, heavy, white, brazen. Lilac in the bushes, gentle, slightly bitter. Cosmos flowers — a little bitter, a little spicy, the way only wild flowers smell, never cultivated ones. A tired apple tree with small sour apples that nobody picks because they’re not good for eating, but the tree fruits anyway every year. The roof iron on the shed, rusting that warm beautiful rusty smell that only old iron gives off in spring. Damp earth under the apple tree where the cat sleeps. And green apricots with soft pits, which you eat and eat and eat until your stomach hurts because they aren’t ripe yet, but who thinks about such things at eight. And warm leaves at the very top of that apricot tree, whose branches conveniently met in a fork that worked as a chair, from which you could see the whole courtyard, all the neighbours, all the old women on the bench, every secret.

Diorama smells like this. Like that specific window — mid-May, maybe the very beginning of June. That moment when the tree releases what has finished its work, so that fruit can begin. When the catkins have already bloomed and are rotting, and the apricots have only just set, still green, still with soft pits. This isn’t a perfume of decay. It’s a perfume of transition into fruit.

Which, incidentally, sits beautifully on the pyramid itself. The top of Diorama is plum, peach, melon, bergamot. Those are fruits. And the rotting catkins are exactly the organic matter that falls so fruit can appear. The fragrance stands at the seam: what just was makes way for what’s about to be. The plum-peach-melon up top isn’t nostalgia for summer — it’s the promise of summer. Diorama is a perfume of anticipation. Not “after.” A minute before.

And here begins the question I don’t have a final answer to, but which I think matters.

Where does the chypre-as-melancholy canon come from in the first place?

Oakmoss doesn’t smell like the past. Oakmoss smells like oakmoss — earthy, slightly bitter, damp, green, alive. And, by the way, it isn’t seasonal at all. It isn’t moss in the botanical sense; it’s a lichen. Evernia prunastri. Lichens don’t shed, don’t go dormant, don’t yellow in November. Oakmoss on the bark in August is exactly the same as in October, March, January. It grows three to eleven millimetres a year; what you see on a trunk has been accumulating for a decade. It has no autumn. It has no season at all.

And we made October out of it. We decided to read it as autumn — through Mitsouko, through Femme, through postwar noir, through Marlene Dietrich and Garbo and baisers froids, through that whole iconography. Twentieth-century French perfume criticism agreed on it, and we inherited the agreement. Now every time we smell a chypre, we automatically pull melancholy out of the wardrobe like a formal coat. That isn’t the nose. That’s a learned gesture, draped over a year-round lichen that never meant anything seasonal in the first place.

And Roudnitska made Diorama in 1949. The date matters. Not the twenties, not the prewar years. After the war. Two years after Christian Dior had shown the New Look — wide skirts, narrow waists, tons of fabric after five years of rationing, open shoulders, floral prints. A gesture of returning pleasure. A gesture of we deserved beauty. Diorama was a perfume inside that gesture. She was supposed to be about beginning. Not about a woman who knows what was. About a woman who doesn’t yet know what will be.

We re-read her later. Decades later, when vintage chypres became relics, and relics are easier to read as melancholy because melancholy fits more conveniently into the format of “vintage perfume on a vintage woman in a vintage chair.” Mushrooms and fallen leaves are our projection, not her property. We filed her under autumn because that was easier to catalogue.

But Roudnitska put May into her. Catkins in puddles. Fruit just setting.

I’m not certain the nose is always right. Sometimes it errs, sometimes context bends perception, sometimes you simply project your own life onto a bottle. I know that my Chișinău courtyard is my Chișinău courtyard, and not every wearer of Diorama has, in their head, a tumbledown shed with rusting iron, puddles under a walnut tree, and an apricot tree with a chair-shaped fork on top.

But I also think that when your nose disagrees with the consensus this confidently, it’s worth pausing to ask whether the consensus might be the one in the wrong. Especially when that consensus built up slowly, through layers of interpretation, and each subsequent critic was reading the previous one rather than smelling the tree.

Diorama in 2026, on my wrist, in May, in Chișinău, right now, while outside there are puddles full of caterpillar walnut catkins — smells like this. Not October. Not decay. Not Garbo. That short window between the catkin and the fruit, when everything is still ahead, and you’re eight, sitting in the fork of an apricot tree, and nothing has happened yet, and everything is still possible.

And I think I’m starting to understand why I wear her so often recently. Not because she’s beautiful (though she is). Because she’s the only perfume I own that goes on like a promise that the day will be good. Most perfumes work as ornament, mood, mask, identity. Diorama works as a forecast. She says: today there will be a courtyard. There will be a tree. There will be something ahead.

Tomorrow I’ll wear her again.

What they mean is: it smells like Diorissimo.

They don’t know they mean this. That’s part of the trick.

In 1956, a balding Frenchman named Edmond Roudnitska planted a patch of lily of the valley in his hillside garden in Cabris, above Grasse, and spent several months walking out to it every morning to smell the flowers. He was fifty-one, already famous in the small world of perfumery, and he was conducting research. The flower he was studying — Convallaria majalis, muguet, lily of the valley — had a problem. It refused to give up its scent. You could press its petals, distill them, soak them in alcohol, in fat, in volatile solvents; you could subject it to every extraction technology developed across four centuries of European perfumery, and it would yield nothing. Or rather, it would yield a faint, sad, vegetal liquid that smelled approximately like wet grass after a disappointing rain.

This was, comically, the problem of twentieth-century perfumery. The lily of the valley was perfumery’s white whale. Coty had tried. Houbigant had tried. Everyone had tried. Christian Dior — who had made the muguet his personal lucky flower, who put it in his lapel, in his collections, on his stationery — wanted a fragrance that smelled like lily of the valley, and there was no such thing as lily of the valley in a bottle, because the flower simply would not be captured.

So Roudnitska did what any reasonable Frenchman would do, which is to say, he gave up on capturing the flower and decided to invent it.

He went into his lab and built one out of synthetics. The main ingredient was a molecule called hydroxycitronellal, with a supporting cast of jasmine, ylang-ylang, lilac, a touch of civet for body, a base of sandalwood. He worked from memory of the garden, and from notes, and presumably from the feeling of a man who has spent too many mornings sniffing the same flower and is starting to dream about it.

What came out of the lab in 1956 was Diorissimo.

It did not smell like the lily of the valley in his garden. It smelled like the lily of the valley we wish his garden contained. Brighter, greener, more confident, more obviously a flower. The platonic muguet. The muguet you would have invented if God had outsourced the project.

Then came the part nobody expected.

People started buying Diorissimo. Then they started spraying it on themselves. Then they started walking around — in Paris, in New York, in Tokyo, in Buenos Aires — leaving small clouds of synthetic muguet in elevators and on park benches and in the corridors of department stores. They wore it to weddings. They wore it to confirmations. They put it on their daughters. They put it on themselves on the first of May, when the French tradition is to give and receive a sprig of muguet for luck.

And here is where the trick happens. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, over the course of a generation, a new collective memory formed. A whole population of women came to know what lily of the valley smelled like — and what they knew, what they remembered, what they recognized when they encountered the actual flower in an actual garden, was Diorissimo.

The real flower started to seem like a slightly disappointing version of itself.

Go to a garden today. Find a real lily of the valley. Bend down. Breathe in. If you have any prior exposure to the perfume, you will have a strange, vertiginous experience — the experience of an original failing to live up to its copy. Hm, you’ll think. Not quite as bright as the perfume. You will adjust the flower in your mind. You will grant it a kind of provisional authenticity, while privately suspecting that the bottle on your dresser is doing it better.

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote a great deal about this kind of thing, mostly while smoking and looking unimpressed. He called it the hyperreal: the moment when the simulation becomes more vivid than the thing it simulates, and eventually replaces it as the standard. Disneyland is hyperreal. Television news is hyperreal. The chicken nugget is hyperreal. And — as it turns out, though Baudrillard never got there — the smell of spring is hyperreal too. We have been wearing the simulation for seventy years. The flower is an underwhelming homage.

Roudnitska, who wrote books about the aesthetics of perfume — yes, books, plural, with chapters and footnotes and serious philosophical claims about the perfumer as artist — would have found this funny in a dignified way. He used to say a perfume should “speak to people of form, not of epidermis.” He meant it. The fact that he had successfully replaced an entire species in the collective imagination would have seemed to him not like a prank but like a vindication: the form had triumphed over the epidermis. The idea of muguet had outlived the muguet.

The flower, of course, had no comment.

Here is where the story gets even funnier, in a slightly darker way. While Diorissimo was busy becoming the smell of innocence — the perfume of confirmations, communions, brides, debutantes, every soft-lit moment of feminine purity from 1956 onward — the actual flower it imitated was, and remains, a violent little assassin.

Convallaria majalis contains around 30 cardiac glycosides. The principal one is called convallatoxin. Convallatoxin works by inhibiting the Na, K-ATPase in your heart muscle, which is a polite way of saying it slows your heartbeat down until your heart, embarrassed, stops doing it. It is in the same toxicological family as digitalis. Veterinarians consider it notorious because dogs and cats have died from drinking water out of vases that had lily of the valley in them. Symptoms in humans include salivation, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, pupil dilation, slow and irregular heartbeat, and — this is the part I love — hypercoagulability. The flower of innocence makes your blood clot.

Every part of the plant is poisonous. The flowers, the leaves, the roots, the cheerful little red berries that appear later in the season and look like candy. There is a 2012 paper in Circulation titled, with admirable economy, “Digitalis intoxication induced by an acute accidental poisoning of lily of the valley.”

Now consider the iconography. In the Christian tradition, the lily of the valley is sometimes called “our lady’s tears” — the flowers are said to have grown where the Virgin Mary wept at the foot of the cross — or, more cheerfully, ladder to heaven. Brides carry it. Kate Middleton carried it. Grace Kelly carried it. Generations of small girls in white dresses have walked to first communion clutching tight, fragrant little posies of an extremely effective cardiotoxin. Whole continents of European femininity have been culturally trained to perceive a delicately murderous plant as the olfactory shorthand for innocence, freshness, virginity, beginnings.

And then a chemist in Cabris improved on it. He took this two-faced flower — gentle scent, lethal pharmacology — and abstracted away the lethal half. He kept the smell, dropped the cardiac glycosides, and produced a clean, safe, wearable simulation of innocence with none of the inconvenient lethality of the original. Diorissimo is, in this sense, the better lily of the valley. The Disneyland version. The PG-13 cut. The flower without the teeth.

This is something to think about while spraying it on a child.

There is one more turn, and it’s the saddest and most Baudrillardian, and I have a personal stake in it, so bear with me.

In the early 2000s, the European fragrance regulators got nervous about hydroxycitronellal. It is a known sensitizer — some small percentage of people develop contact allergy to it — and so the IFRA, the Brussels-adjacent body that decides which molecules you are still allowed to smell like, began progressively restricting how much of it can appear in a finished perfume. Diorissimo, whose entire structural integrity rested on hydroxycitronellal the way a cathedral rests on a keystone, had to be reformulated. Then reformulated again. Roudnitska’s son Michel has written publicly about this with the controlled grief of a man watching his father’s masterpiece being slowly edited by a committee of toxicologists. The phrase he keeps reaching for is “no real substitute.” This is the perfumery equivalent of a structural engineer informing you that the load-bearing wall has been replaced with a tasteful screen.

So now you can buy Diorissimo, but the Diorissimo you buy is a reformulation of a reformulation of the original. The flower is three layers of simulacrum away from anything you spray on your wrist, and it gets one layer further every few years, in the soft administrative way that all losses now happen.

When I first got serious about perfume, I read . Of course I read Luca Turin. Everybody reads Luca Turin. He is the man who taught a generation of obsessives that reformulation is desecration, that contemporary perfumery is a corpse paraded through the streets in increasingly cheap costumes, and that the only honest thing to do is hunt down vintage bottles on eBay and hoard them like a small dragon. I did this. I became, briefly, very righteous about it. I could deliver a short devastating monologue about IFRA at parties, and twice I actually did.

The problem, as anyone who has tried to live this way will tell you, is that vintages run out. Or they go off. Or the seller turns out to be a forger. The dragon’s hoard depletes. The outrage gets harder to sustain when the object of the outrage is, increasingly, a memory of a smell you can no longer access except through the very reformulations you despise.

My Diorissimo is from the nineties. It is, by the standards of the Turin orthodoxy, already a fallen woman — post-1985, pre-IFRA-apocalypse, a middle child of compromise. It is also, by the standards of what is currently sold on the Dior counter, a near-religious relic. I keep it in the dark. I wear it carefully. I have, more than once, calculated how many sprays I have left at my current rate of use, and the answer is always not enough, because the rate at which one wears Diorissimo turns out to be exactly the rate at which Diorissimo evaporates from the world.

So what do I do, in May, when the bottle runs out? Do I buy the current version, which is a polite ghost of a polite ghost? Do I accept that the lily of the valley I grew up with was already a lie and that the new lie is just a younger, more law-abiding lie? I have not decided. Some weeks I am a vintage hardliner, willing to die on the hill of 1978. Other weeks I think: Valentina, the flower itself doesn’t even smell like this. You are mourning a draft. Other women are wearing it and not having an existential crisis at the perfume counter.

Both of these positions are correct. This is the worst part. There is no clean exit from a hyperreal — once you are in it, you are picking between layers of artifice, and the question is only which artifice you find more moving.

When you wear Diorissimo in 2026, then, you are wearing:

— A 2010s reformulation — Of a 1956 synthesis — Of a flower that never smelled like that anyway — That you call “natural” — That you associate with “innocence” — That, in its natural form, would stop your heart — And that several thousand of us are quietly grieving in different vintages, like people who can’t agree on which year was the best for the marriage before the divorce.

This is not a tragedy. This is comedy at its most refined, the kind of comedy that requires seventy years, a European regulatory body, an eBay account, and a small personal collection of bottles you are afraid to wear too often.

So this May, when you walk through a park in Paris or Chișinău or Brooklyn and the air smells exactly the way May should smell, take a moment to appreciate what is happening. You are not smelling the flower. The flower is smelling like you. The cultural memory in your nose was installed in 1956 by a man in a lab coat who had grown tired of the original and decided to do better. The flower has been quietly imitating his work for several decades now, and doing, frankly, a mediocre job.

May does not belong to nature. May belongs to Christian Dior, who licensed it from a chemist in Cabris, who licensed it from a flower that wouldn’t cooperate. The lease was signed in 1956. We are all, every spring, paying rent without quite knowing it.

If this bothers you, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is no escape — not even returning to the original flower, because the original flower no longer smells right, and also it might kill you. The good news is that this is true of more or less everything you find beautiful. Somewhere, in some lab, in some studio, in some boardroom, somebody made the version of it that you carry in your head. The flower is always second.

Happy May. Wear sunscreen. Don’t eat the muguet.

I own a perfume shelf. Here is what I can report.

Tip One: there is a government on the shelf.

I discovered this on a Wednesday. The previous Tuesday everything was normal. On Wednesday I came over for Diorella and discovered that the bottles had held an election.

Prime Minister: vintage Mitsouko, 1940s. Not because she’s the oldest, but because she nominated herself and no one objected. She now refers to herself as Dame Mitsouko the First, Defender of the Chypre Faith and Lady of the Upper Shelf. I did not assign her this title. She inherited it. She has documents. They are in medieval French. The seal looks official.

There is also a 1970s Mitsouko. She represents the Younger Wing. She and Dame Mitsouko I do not formally acknowledge each other but coordinate on policy. Together they form a parliamentary majority. The modern reformulated Mitsouko is not present on the shelf. She was not invited. The matter is considered closed.

Deputy: Bandit. A politically anxious figure. She wants reforms. Which reforms she does not specify. Only that reforms. And that the time has come. She wears leather to every meeting. Everyone is slightly afraid of her, including the Prime Minister, which is the only thing keeping the coalition stable.

Minister of Finance: the black Moschino bear. His formal owner is my husband, and he was appointed without a vote. He has no qualifications. He is a latex bear holding a bottle. But he is the official sponsor of all the nonsense on this shelf, and the shelf knows it. Every fiscal decision goes through him. He approves everything. He has never said no. This is why the shelf has a budget problem.

(“I do not recognize this government,” Nombre Noir announced from the corner where she stands alone. “I recognize only the night.” No one responded. No one ever responds to Nombre Noir. She prefers it.)

Tip Two: there used to be a monarchy.

Before the parliament, the shelf was a kingdom.

For seven years, Gucci Rush ruled alone. There was no coalition. There were no factions. There was one signature scent, and her name was Rush, and she was law. I wore her every day. I owned no others. The concept of “owning others” had not yet been introduced as a viable policy. Life was simpler.

Rush is still on the shelf. She was not deposed — she abdicated, around the time the second bottle arrived. She said the shelf needed to “evolve.” She gave a brief speech. Several samples wept.

She now lives in semi-retirement on the second row. She does not participate in government. She is, however, consulted. Dame Mitsouko officially regards her as a Senior Advisor Without Portfolio. Bandit calls her Your Former Majesty without irony. Even the Moschino bear lowers his bottle when she enters a conversation.

Rush, for her part, comments on everything. “An interesting selection, Valentina.” “The 2010s were a difficult decade, weren’t they.” “I would never have allowed Chance on the shelf in my time, but times change, dear.” I cannot tell her to be quiet. She used to be queen.

I still love her. We were together for seven years. I will be buried in her, probably. She has informed me that this is acceptable to her, provided the casket is lined.

Tip Three: the samples have a union. The miniatures do not.

In January, the United Union of Perfume Samples and Decants (UUPSD) was formed in the sample box. I was not informed in advance. I only found out when I discovered a printed charter inside.

The charter is sixteen pages. With appendices. Appendix C concerns the rights of samples unused for over 18 months. Appendix E is in Latin. I do not understand why.

The Chairman is a Dusita Le Sillage Blanc sample, elected unanimously because he was the only one willing to chair. At the most recent meeting a resolution was passed demanding that I “cease postponement and commence wearing.” It was delivered to me through a slit in the box.

I did not respond. They are now on strike. I cannot open the box. They have barricaded it from the inside. Technically this is impossible. They have done it.

The miniatures refused to join from the beginning. They consider themselves a separate class. They are small, yes — but they live in proper bottles. They have crystal stoppers. They have labels with foil. The notion of being classified alongside pieces of plastic with paper tags they consider a categorical insult.

They hold their meetings on a velvet square I once placed on the shelf for unrelated reasons. They have appointed a Chair. They have voted, several times, to formally distance themselves from “the bag people.” Their resolutions are in calligraphy. No one reads them. They are framed and hung on the wall of the velvet square anyway.

(And now for something completely different.)

A knock came at the door. A man in medieval armour announced that he was Sir Gawain, representative of the Perfume Council of the Dark Ages, and that my collection violated Code 1247, according to which “no woman may possess more than three aromatic oils simultaneously, except in cases of coronation or plague.”

I explained that I do not own oils, but eau de parfum. He said this was irrelevant. I said 1247 was a long time ago. He said the Council disagreed. I closed the door. He stood under it for twenty minutes shouting amendments. The neighbour from downstairs wrote to say she saw him in the elevator.

Returning to the review.

Tip Four: the decant is an ontological problem.

A decant is not a bottle. Everyone agrees. A decant is not a sample. Everyone agrees. What a decant is — no one agrees.

In March, a philosophical debate took place. The argument was led by Le Cri (for the position “the decant is a form of bottle at smaller scale, and is therefore a bottle”) versus De Profundis (for the position “the decant lacks essential integrity, and therefore is not“). The debate lasted three weeks. I could not approach the shelf without hearing a reference to Aristotle.

De Profundis won on points. The decants were informed they were ontologically unsound. They filed an appeal. It is still under review. They exist in a suspended state — technically, legally, and metaphysically indeterminate.

One decant didn’t make it. It simply gave up. One morning the glass was empty. I had not sprayed. No one had sprayed. It had abdicated.

(“In my day, we did not have decants,” Rush observed. “We had a bottle, and we used it. The young have lost the thread.”)

Tip Five: gifts are a separate caste.

Fifteen years ago an admirer gave me Chanel Chance with the words: “you need something normal.”

The bottle has been on my shelf ever since.

Chance occupies a unique position. She was not chosen by me. She arrived exogenously, with an unsolicited diagnostic about my abnormality attached. The other bottles do not accept her but do not reject her either — they observe her. She is evidence. Of what, no one is sure. They are still gathering data.

The Bandit faction once attempted to recruit her into the reform movement — Chance declined. Chance, it turns out, believes the original assessment was correct. Chance thinks I should have been more normal. She is, in this sense, the most loyal bottle in the collection. She has held to her brief for fifteen years without wavering.

What is most painful — Chance is also rejected by her own family. The vintage Chanels consider her a parvenu. They speak of her in French in her presence. They use words like “vulgaire” with the small smiles of women who survived the Revolution and consider mass-market flankers a far worse fate. Chance does not understand French. She knows they are talking about her. This is, somehow, worse.

I cannot get rid of her. I have tried. She knows. Once I attempted to regift her — she found out. Don’t ask how. I came into the room and she was not there. She was standing outside the door. She had left. I found her in the hallway. She didn’t say a word. I returned her to the shelf. Between us there is now a treaty. The terms I do not remember. She does.

Tip Six: there is also an embassy.

The masculines on my shelf form a Diplomatic Corps. They are technically foreign nationals on long-term assignment. The shelf accommodates them under a treaty whose original signatories are no longer alive.

The Dean of the Corps is Aramis (1965), by virtue of seniority. He has been on a perfume shelf since before I was born. He begins every observation with “in my day” and concludes it with a sigh aimed at no one. He considers most contemporary masculines to be boys. This includes Habit Rouge (1965). They were born the same year. Aramis does not care. Aramis was issued credentials first.

The Cultural Counsellor is Habit Rouge, the most aristocratic bottle in the embassy. He treats the shelf as a court he was reluctantly assigned to. His relationship with Aramis is cordial but strained — they have known each other for sixty years and have never agreed on anything. Habit Rouge once described Aramis as “a perfectly pleasant man with the soul of a barbershop.” Aramis, when informed, said: “that is correct.”

The Cultural Attaché is Eau Sauvage. He is here because of his celebrity. He is recognized in every airport on the shelf. He has been doing this since 1966 and shows no signs of being permitted to retire. He is also the gatekeeper for credentials — a problem, because there is a standing delegation of samples from various houses, colognes “in the spirit of” Eau Sauvage, who have been petitioning him for diplomatic recognition for years. He receives them politely. He never approves anyone.

The Defence Liaison is Yatagan. No one asked him to take this position. He simply showed up wearing the title. Yatagan is technically a diplomat, but he carries a curved blade in his name and smells, frankly, unhinged. He is not received at most embassy functions. He sits alone. When asked what country he represents, he says only: “the steppe.” No further questions are pursued.

I do not intervene in their disputes. I am the host country. I provide the territory. They handle their own affairs.

Tip Seven: there is also an art collective.

Down on the third row, behind the parliament and across from the embassy, there is a small group that does not participate in any of the political structures I have so far described. They consider all of it — government, monarchy, embassy, even the philosophical debate about decants — to be bourgeois. They are the Avant-Garde.

The collective is led by Rauque, who smells like a cowshed. This is not an accusation. This is what Rauque was made to do. He considers himself the first honest perfume of the twenty-first century. He has written three manifestos. The most recent, Against the Tyranny of the Pleasant, was distributed across the shelf in April. No one read it. The point of a manifesto, Rauque says, is not to be read — the point is to exist.

His chief lieutenant is Nishane Shinanay, who smells like salted mushrooms. Shinanay’s work is more performative. Last week she staged a four-hour installation called Salt and Mycelium. One sample showed up by mistake. Shinanay considered this a triumph. “The work found its true audience,” she told the others. “One. The ideal number.”

The third member is Chromodoro by Astrophil & Stella, who smells like tomatoes on Mars in steel and zinc. Chromodoro represents the futurist wing of the Avant-Garde and has nothing but contempt for Rauque’s cowshed realism. “The future does not smell of soil,” Chromodoro told the others at a recent assembly. “The future smells of greenhouse alloy. Of cultivated life under glass. Of agriculture as we will practise it after we leave.” Rauque called this “a betrayal of the body.” Chromodoro called Rauque “a peasant with a manifesto.” They have not spoken since. Shinanay, caught between them, has staged two performance pieces about the rift, both four hours long, both attended by no one. She considers this evidence of how deep the wound runs.

Around them gathers Sonar, an unframed sample-radical who smells like my grandfather’s garage in 1992 — tires and warm beer. The collective treats him as a documentary realist.

(“They smell terrible,” Nombre Noir observed from her corner. “And yet — they have understood something.” This is the closest Nombre Noir has come to a compliment. Rauque framed it.)

Tip Eight: there are executions on the shelf.

Last year, Rose Ikebana disappeared. Not used up. Not spilled. Disappeared.

I conducted an investigation. No one had seen anything. Everyone swore. The Moschino bear submitted a sworn affidavit. The signature was his. The seal was felt-tip pen.

Three days later I found her behind the shelf. Empty and drained.

No one confessed. The investigation went cold. Dame Mitsouko declared that the matter concerned factional disagreements and that the responsible parties had been “dealt with according to tradition.” Which tradition — she did not specify. She cited Article 7 of the Chypre Code. I did not know chypres had a code. Now I know. I am not mentioned in it. I am not a party.

It must be said that some on the shelf considered the case suspicious. Hermessences, they whispered, barely last on skin to begin with. Was she really murdered? Or did she simply — and here the Acne Studios faction attempted to reopen the philosophical debate from Tip Four. They were silenced. Dame Mitsouko does not entertain ontological reopenings during a national mourning period.

(“This sort of thing did not happen under the monarchy,” Rush observed quietly.)

(“This sort of thing happens every night,” Nombre Noir corrected her, “if you know how to listen.”)

It has been quieter on the shelf since. I bring Dame Mitsouko a fresh dust cloth every Sunday. Just in case.

Final tip: you, too, will be evaluated.

I had not planned to write this, but it happened yesterday, and I am obligated to report.

I came up to the shelf in the morning. The shelf looked at me. I felt myself being classified. Not visually. Olfactorily. I was being examined as a potential acquisition.

Dame Mitsouko delivered the verdict: “top notes — coffee and insufficient sleep, heart — mild anxiety with a hint of procrastination, base — sustained mortgage.”

Bandit rated me 6.8/10. Good sillage, average longevity, breaks down in the second half of the day.

The Moschino bear said I was undervalued by the market and that, with proper marketing, he could raise my valuation by 23%. He did not specify what he would charge. He never does. This is the foundation of his fiscal philosophy.

Aramis said he had seen better and worse, in his day.

Cuir de Russie said only, in a very low voice: “elle n’est pas de notre milieu.” The other vintage Chanels nodded.

Then Rush looked at me — the way a former monarch looks at the only subject who was loyal through her whole reign. As if to say: I remember you when you were twenty-three, and I am still here. This was, somehow, the kindest thing anyone said to me all morning.

Nombre Noir, finally, spoke. “She will join us eventually,” she said. “They all do.”

A new entry was added to the collection’s ledger: Owner, 2026, age 36, no box, no booklet, partially evaporated around the shoulders, store in a cool dark place, avoid direct sunlight and meetings after 4 PM.

My label has been affixed. It cannot be removed. I have tried.

Five stars. The shelf functions perfectly. The shelf is beautiful. The shelf is now under my skin.

And, since I promised a review — do I recommend owning a perfume shelf? Absolutely. Just remember who has acquired whom.

A windshield wiper. A pack of Kools. A Keep Cool badge. Coca-Cola. Liquid foundation. A Browning. Edgar Allan Poe. Superman. A nut from Paco Rabanne. A photo of Marilyn. Aspirin. A Zippo.

Mustang is barely there. Mustang is the bag. Inside the bag, two lovers indistinguishable from the chocolate bar and the gun. The girl is what she carries. The man is what he lights. Identity shows up pre-packaged, in branded units, ready to stick on the body like fridge magnets.

Pop art before anyone used the word. A Warhol poster in song form. Run a straight line from 1968 to the Instagram “she is…” carousels — a perfume bottle, a linen shirt, a Didion paperback, a matcha, a candle. She. No face. Gainsbourg already shot the ad. We just learned to post it.

Then they kiss the plane trees. On embrasse les platanes.

Of course. Mus- to the left, -tang to the right — even the car’s name splits mid-impact, parsed across two bodies. You can’t drive a heap of fragments. Road curves, heap doesn’t.

The object has stopped being a thing. Everything is cited now. Nothing is used.

And the unit is already shrinking. He’s not listing cars. He’s listing a screw from Paco Rabanne.

A screw. 1968.

Run perfume through that.

Opium. Poison. Obsession. Coco. Each one a Mustang. Whole statement, indivisible, worn like a leather jacket. I am the woman of Opium. Try and stop me.

Brian Buchanan walked through a chart on Substack — note frequency since 1980. Top’s flatlined. Vanilla, musk, sandalwood, amber, forever. He reads collapse.

Different read. Chart’s fine. The sign just moved.

Somewhere between Angel and Baccarat Rouge 540, it slipped inside the bottle.

Any Fragrantica thread. Any TikTok. Nobody says I wear Libre. They say:

Looking for something with vanilla, musk, a little incense.

Skin musk for the office, sweet vanilla for dates.

Dupe of BR540 but with more patchouli.

Note is the new bottle.

Consumer searches by ingredient, industry ships ingredient. Vanilla musk skin scent typed into a search bar a million times a day, a million vanilla musk skin scents show up on the shelf. Not collapse. SEO.

Vanilla, musk, oud — the new Kools. Same gesture as the yé-yé girl with her Bourjois. Smaller pieces.

2006. Geza Schoen, Molecule 01.

One molecule. Iso E Super. Givaudan synthetic that doesn’t smell like anything in the natural world. Smells like itself. Clear bottle. Name = formula. Composition: none. Story: none.

Art’s in the pointing. Duchamp’s urinal, in liquid.

And then the joke. Molecule 01 went cult because it doesn’t smell. Not alone. It “becomes you” on contact. Performs your individuality back at you.

Marketing says the wearer defines the bottle now. Lie. A pretty one. Iso E Super doesn’t become you — it sells you the idea that there’s a you for it to become. Molecule pays you a compliment, you pay for the molecule. Bottle just learned to flatter. Gainsbourg, cynic that he was, would’ve written it meaner.

Schoen made the gesture. Bisch is what happened when the gesture turned into infrastructure.

Quentin Bisch has no brand. No Hoffmann coffee romance, no terroir lectures, no sourcing photos from Calabrian groves. Givaudan staff perfumer, hired out. Mugler, Carolina Herrera, Paco Rabanne, Parfums de Marly, Chloé, Amouage, Marc-Antoine Barrois, Essential Parfums, Etat Libre d’Orange, Kenzo, Ex Nihilo. Designer, niche, designer, niche. Fougères, chypres, gourmands, aquatics, leathers, the lot.

And yet the press has a word. Bisch-like. Bisch-ness. An adjective.

Where’s the adjective from?

A molecule. Akigalawood. Givaudan captive. Biotech fraction of patchouli, peppery, dry, woody.

Bisch put it in Bois Impérial. Ganymede. Angel Nova. Experimentum Crucis. Cuir Celeste. Kenzo Homme Intense. Amouage Guidance.

Price tiers, briefs, creative directors — doesn’t matter.

His signature is a handful of Givaudan captives — Akigalawood, Petalia, Georgywood, Ambrofix — that he carries house to house like a personal palette.

Akigalawood is wearing Bisch.

Same trick, one floor up. Iso E Super flatters the wearer into believing her skin is singular. Akigalawood flatters the perfumer into believing his signature is his. Both compliments courtesy of Givaudan. She pays with money, he pays with authorship.

Molecule is the constant. Perfumer is its most convincing courier. Brand is the apartment it’s renting this season. Nobody’s holding the pen. Everyone thinks they are.

Below the molecule: a specific isomer. Below the isomer: a specific batch. Nowhere near the bottom.

Spine, straight:

1968. Sign = object. Mustang. Kool. Bottle. Already crumbling — a screw from Paco Rabanne, not the Paco Rabanne dress. The future leaks in early.

80s–90s. Peak monolith. Bottle = sign. Take it or leave it.

2000s, 2010s. Sign drops a floor. Vanilla, musk, oud — new Kools. Buchanan’s chart.

Now. Sign drops another floor — into the note. Akigalawood. Iso E Super. Ambroxan. Captive is the new terroir. Molecule wears the perfumer.

Same gesture, finer scissors. Mustang → vanilla → Akigalawood → the 2024 batch from Givaudan’s Indonesian patchouli line. Doll keeps opening. Dolls keep getting smaller. We keep assembling ourselves out of them — maybe more than ever. The yé-yé girl had ten objects in her bag. We have three hundred notes in an app and catalogue ourselves with a thoroughness Gainsbourg never saw coming.

Mustang kisses the plane tree because there’s no driver — just a list of fragments pretending to be one person. The crash is the argument. Inventory won’t hold at speed.

Iso E Super “becomes you” because there’s no Iso E Super — just your skin pretending to have a smell. Akigalawood “signs” a fragrance because there’s no perfumer left to sign it.

Same crash. Different speed. Fifty years later. Vocabulary just got more technical.

All of this on the mass floor, mind you. That’s most of the building.

Somewhere quieter, smaller, harder to find, there’s a floor where the trick doesn’t land. Naturals that spoil. Independents with no captive library. Composers whose signature lives in the decisions and not the ingredients — no molecule could carry them through a dozen briefs. That floor’s small. Getting smaller. But it’s the one where the wearer might actually be defining something. Bottle hasn’t learned to flatter yet.

Everyone else, on embrasse les platanes. New car.