DanielPlainview
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The New Republic. February 6,1995 (EDITED AND ABRIDGED BY DANIEL PLAINVIEW)
BREAKING THE SMELL BARRIER. GET A WHIFF OF THIS
By Richard Klein
Richard Klein, a professor of French at Cornell University, is the author of Cigarettes
Are Sublime (Duke).
In American culture, descended from Puritans, all universal sources of pleasure are
eventually medicalized, then politicized and finally policed�if not prohibited altogether:
witness alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, fat, pornography, masturbation. Take perfume,
more and more considered to be a drug and, like all drugs, both venerated as medicine
and despised as poison.
Perfume sales are booming: $4.8 billion last year. Americans are celebrating its
traditional virtues, as a source ofliealing, a jewel ofself-adomment, an instrument of
seduction and a mild inebriant. There is also the return of aromatherapy, a New Age,
age-old nostrum prescribed since antiquity, but which disappeared in the eighteenth
century with the birth of modem medicine. Aromatherapy uses the fragrant essence of
flowers and the scented oils of herbs to assuage tensions, refresh the spirit and cure a
variety of ills. In the hands of therapists, perfume is assimilated to balm.
Yet The New York Times reports that the University of Minnesota has begun to adopt
a "scent-free policy" that bans perfume from certain areas on behalf of those who suffer
from multiple chemical sensitivities. The newspaper noted that this move may mark the
beginning of a national chemical correctness revolution. An organization called the
Human Ecology Action League has declared: "Perfume is going to be the tobacco
smoke of tomorrow." To those who want to make America scent-free, perfume vapor,
like nicotine smoke, is a mephitic poison in the nose, like the smell of a reeky skunk
(Latin, mephitis). To those sickened by its mephitis, perfume is a foul exhalation
impurely emitted from bodies drenched in its stench. Mephistopheles, who stinks like
Hell, takes his name from the skunk.
Perfume is threatening because it is so insinuating. Tlie anti-scent movement had a
notable success a couple of years ago when it forced Tlie New Yorker to stop running
scent strips in perfume ads. The magazine caved under the movement's strongest
argument, that the strips represented a harmful intrusion into the lives of the chemically
sensitive. The magazine issued a statement saying it would alter its policy out of
concern for those who "were not comfortable smelling fragrance throughout the issue."
The crucial word here seems to be "throughout." The dream of advertisers is a scent
strip whose spray would be so precisely aimed that its fragrance would last only as long
as it took to sniff and turn the page. But in fact the reader had no way of escaping the
smell throughout the issue, for perfume's very nature is to leak; its power of expansion
defies editorial control. Though perfume may impose itself casually or with willful
audacity, it is always unavoidable. Perfume never gives the smeller a chance.
Smell has a long history of condemnation. During the eighteenth century, the naturalist
Buffon, following Aristotle, called smell the most animalistic of the senses and like
Kant he disparaged it. It was not until Freud that this old story was set on its head.
Freud's suspicion was aroused by the forces allied against smell. In a characteristic
move, he reversed the hierarchy of the senses and in one of his most daring
speculations argued that smell's higher truth was being concealed with the force of a
taboo.
.................................
That truth, however, should not keep us from acknowledging that there are times when
armpits can be dynamite. It depends on your tastes and theirs. Historian Alain Corbin
recounts in The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the Social Imagination that Henry iii,
King of France, was reputed to have been smitten his whole life with Marie de Cleves
after he entered a room where she had just been changing and smelled the odor that still
clung to her chemise.
Sensitivity to strong odor varies widely from culture to culture. Oily me French could
eat a whole truffle. The odor of it in our noses would be overwhelming. But a few
slivers in your scrambled eggs and you can sniff the wind in the old trees. The French,
at least since Baudelaire, are persuaded there are no absolutely bad or good smells. The
poet wrote that the strongest, most disagreeable smell, if sufficiently diluted, can
become divine, whereas the most heavenly perfume smells to hell when it's too
concentrated.
Compared with the French, we have little tolerance for excremental scent. A great
burgundy, it is commonly said in France, has a distinct, albeit distant odor of pig merde.
The French love the smell of everything that belongs to organs and intestines. French
noses thrill at the pissy perfume of cooking kidneys; they love to hang their wild ducks
for a week or more before roasting, curing them until they've reached the pungent edge
of putrefaction. Sex among the French is preoccupied, often obsessed, with anality;
here we focus on breasts, a national fixation analyzed decades ago by Philip Wylie.
The predominance of oral as distinct from anal fixations in American culture seems to
require excessively repressive taboos on all dark and disturbing smells. America's
romance is still with milk�with consuming the white fat of that infinitely pure,
all-forgiving, scarcely odorous maternal gift.
Of course, America has its own special tribal relations to strong smell. In The Raw and
the Cooked, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss tells the story of a platoon of
Americans passing by the mouth of a cave in Normandy during World War ii. The
stench issuing from it was so appalling that they used a flamethrower to incinerate what
they were sure must be rotting corpses. The truth they discovered was that these caves
belonged to the Roquefort cooperative and were brimming with the aging moldy
cheese. Levi-Strauss noted the cultural difference: what a French nose knows to be the
sharp effluvia of delicious ripening is evidence to a g.i. nose of carrion flesh. Or
perhaps it is the American taboo on death that makes us hate the smell of any strong
odors. Any time we smell a dark smell or even an intense one, it reminds us either of
our animality or our mortality. In a way, tliese are the same thing. The poet Archie
Ammons once said that America is always trying to hide the stencil of death� anything
that speaks of putrefaction, of our body's partial transformation from solid liquid into
gas. The taboo on strong smells must reflect some deeper irrational fear. As if sniffing
could kill us, the way the mysterious odor that arose from the body of a dying woman
in Riverside, California, sickened the doctors and nurses who treated her. Even
perfumes devised to mask the smell of our rot participate in it; they can't help evoking
the very vile odor their beautiful fragrance conceals.
Throughout North America, intense shame surrounds smelling bad. Psychologists note
that people with real or imagined congenital odors are among their most deeply
troubled patients. The head of a Canadian clinic specializing in treating chronic bad
breath remarked that the condition is devastating. "Clients complain of rocky
marriages, continual rejection at job interviews or lost promotion opportunities," he told
the Montreal Gazette. Many people, particularly women, dread speaking about intimate
odors, and those most ashamed are least likely to seek help for what is often a medical
problem: bacterial and fungal infections. To smell bad is to be permanently disqualified
from being fully human, too close to being an animal. In America, the sweet smell of
success has no smell; as a nation we dream of being odor-free. Perhaps we Americans
do not smell because we aspire to be like money, which rarely smells. "Pecunia non
olet," replied the Emperor Vespasian when it was suggested to him that it might be
unseemly to put a tax on public toilets. A piece of gold, after all, can emerge even from
a cloaca. Our antiperspirants and deodorants let us play or work as hard or as hot as we
want, and, like gold, remain dry and cool. It has not always been a shame to have
persistent b.o. When people bathed less, the ammoniac smell of semen surrounded
certain men with an unmistakable scent, which signaled the vigor of their phallic
existence. The so-called aura seminalis was said to attract women.
Louis xiv, the Sun King, loved only women who smelled powerfully bad. The worse
they stank the better he liked them. He particularly favored redheads, who were reputed
to have an excess of blood and thus smelled the strongest. He himself reeked horribly,
as the reports of many ambassadors attest. The king abhorred the bath and considered it
unhealthy. He saw himself, like many aristocrats with ancestral ties to the land, as a
demi-peasant who wanted sex to smell the way it does with animals. But we Americans
want the opposite. Scentlessness is civility, though exceptions are still made for a
certain class of Englishmen or Anglophiles who believe not much in bathing.
Louis was not alone in being aroused by bad smells. Plebeians as well as aristocrats
can find them moving. There are many who love the smell of excrement, who are
seduced by it and praise it. After all, it is the most democratic smell, the one tfiat tells
the truth of our universal condition. Our elementary humanity is so insistently present in
that smell that Voltaire adduced it as an argument against the Incarnation, arguing that
no God would ever allow Himself to defecate. A Christian might reply that it is
precisely in that respect, as well, that He, with divine humility, became one of us. Born
in a manger. He doubtless understood the smells of the barnyard.
The sublimity of what smells bad may best be grasped if one credits the widely
circulated rumor that some of the greatest perfumes derive their most troubling strains
from excretions. These are not only glandular secretions such as musk from the penis of
male deer, ambergris disgorged by whales or sensuous smelling civet, deposited in anal
pouches by the eponymous Ethiopian cat, whose scent was beloved by Cleopatra.
Perfumes may, in addition, bear the notes of urine, semen, blood and even feces. Some
activists want the fda, which regulates perfumes, to require its manufacturers to list the
ingredients. Needless to say, the perfumers are resisting mightily, reluctant to invite the
suspicion they are selling Eau de Merde or Air d'Urine. And yet the highest form of
their art may well consist in their ability to exploit excremental notes that are the most
troubling to the American nose, in ways that both disguise the source of the trouble and
mine it for its power to incite a shiver of long repressed carnality. Oddly, the cadre
demanding labeling for perfume has remained small; there has been no public uproar.
Maybe our noses know implicitly some of the ingredients, which we would just as soon
not consciously know anything about.
Are Americans becoming more hysterical or just more sensitized to odor? ........................
Conversely, it may be that the scent-free movement represents a moment in an often
repeated historical cycle. Changes in taste in perfume since the seventeenth century
have always been linked to political changes. After Louis xiv, the aristocracy adopted
the more enlightened English models of hygiene and favored the most delicate floral
scents. With the French Revolution, the aroma of lily�the king's fleur-de-lis�worn as
perfume was enough to send its enthusiasts to the guillotine. Napoleon and Josephine,
who came from Martinique and loved tropical scents, wrote intimate letters to one
another expressing their pleasure in each other's bodily smells. The fashion for strong
animal-based perfumes was reinforced by the taste for antiquity that characterized the
Napoleonic Empire. Being rubbed and oiled with musk made the new aristocrats in the
Tuilleries think they were Roman citizens at the baths. With the Restoration, strong
perfume fell out of fashion. Tobacco and camphor, extolled by doctors for their
therapeutic value, became the scents of choice.
Perfume returned in the middle of the nineteenth century, but less powerfully, more
harmoniously. Queen Victoria was the object of ridicule among the dandies of the
Second Empire, who claimed to have detected an undercurrent of musk in the perfume
she wore on an official visit to Paris in 1855. At the court of Napoleon's nephew,
animal smells were taboo. Americans at the turn of the century were notorious, for their
strong perfumes; a Parisian could tell instantly when an American woman walked into a
room. Two years ago, Aromatique, a home fragrance company, and the maker of
Smells of Christmas, Spring, Summer and Autumn, added Smells of Arkansas to its
line. "It evokes lovely memories of wonderful afternoons in the woods," the company's
owner told The Dallas Morning News. No word how it's doing, or whether the
residents of Washington are watering their roots with it.
The present movement to make America scent-free may be only the most radical
expression of a turn in the cycle of scent, away from the strong perfumes toward barely
detectable "fresh" fragrances. Nobody knows exactly what fresh is, but everybody
wants it. Some perfumes try to capture it by imitating the peppery odor of ozone when
it swirls up from the lip of a waterfall and sharpens the smell of the air. Others evolve
into minty notes with an undertone of camphor to startle the nose. Some exploit the
scent of pine, which masks other odors with its penetrating woody note. If scent is not
shortly prohibited, you can bet it's swinging, under the new more pious regime, in the
direction of being the barest whiff of me purest air. The designer Issey Miyake wanted
a note for his Eau d'lssey that was "kind of translucent. New Age, sparkling water-the
... way the bottle looks aesthetically." Perfume is on the way to becoming so fresh that
it has mainly the odor of the look of the clear bottle that contains it. The designer
dreams of perfume that doesn't smell but looks good.
It has often been observed that humans smell like cheese. Patrick Susskind writes that
babies' feet smell "like fresh butter. And their bodies smell like ... a griddle cake that's
been soaked in milk." Americans, raised on milk, are probably the cheesiest smelling
people on earth. Perhaps that's why we eat so little of it, except when it's included in
something else. The French, who eat a lot of cheese, rarely drink milk. They mostly
smell like wine.
If the Americans and French smell different, then do other nations have a characteristic
smell? Many have claimed they do. Their supposed scent is rarely ever perceived as a
particularly good one. Racism has always been predicated on the belief that one could
detect the characteristic smell of another race. At the turn of the century, a French Dr.
Cabanes described the bland odor of the English, a mixture of leather and seaweed, that
often remained in a room for several years. Around the same time, a distinguished
Japanese scholar. Dr. Buntaro Adachi, denounced the stench of Occidentals. (He may
have had a point. Japanese are without the gland that produces apocrine, the principle
source of underarm odor.) A Dr. Berillon, in 1915, during the First World War, wrote a
much-heralded treatise on the fetid odor of Germans. Racist scientific claims about
Africans can already be found in 1896, when a certain Jean Lorrain wrote that the
"odor of the Negro is like rancid butter and pepper." Berillon went so far as to argue
that smell formed the basis of racial hatred in America. Nothing, he believed, can
overcome its olfactory antagonisms.
I disagree, hi fact, I have my own proposal for a kind of political aromatherapy. Start
from the premise, which is my conclusion, that what smells bad can, in another context,
smell good and vice versa. To wit: body odor, if it's new, is a pheromone; it was
probably designed by our genes to attract, not repulse. Being new, it has not yet
acquired the deep rancid note that emerges after a day or so without bathing. My
proposal, then, is this: If you ever encounter "bad" body odor that your nose tells you
doesn't come from habits of uncleanliness, but is freshly born of physical exertion or
nervous energy, try standing it. Seize the opportunity to struggle with your repressions.
Smell again. With little rabbit sniffs, take a whiff of the other's smell. Then, in
retro-smell. Try to remember or re-nose it, while you do the work of finding other
good odors it resembles. In the end, if you can allow yourself to stand somebody's
smell, you might find your antipathy turning into something like pleasure, maybe love.
BREAKING THE SMELL BARRIER. GET A WHIFF OF THIS
By Richard Klein
Richard Klein, a professor of French at Cornell University, is the author of Cigarettes
Are Sublime (Duke).
In American culture, descended from Puritans, all universal sources of pleasure are
eventually medicalized, then politicized and finally policed�if not prohibited altogether:
witness alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, fat, pornography, masturbation. Take perfume,
more and more considered to be a drug and, like all drugs, both venerated as medicine
and despised as poison.
Perfume sales are booming: $4.8 billion last year. Americans are celebrating its
traditional virtues, as a source ofliealing, a jewel ofself-adomment, an instrument of
seduction and a mild inebriant. There is also the return of aromatherapy, a New Age,
age-old nostrum prescribed since antiquity, but which disappeared in the eighteenth
century with the birth of modem medicine. Aromatherapy uses the fragrant essence of
flowers and the scented oils of herbs to assuage tensions, refresh the spirit and cure a
variety of ills. In the hands of therapists, perfume is assimilated to balm.
Yet The New York Times reports that the University of Minnesota has begun to adopt
a "scent-free policy" that bans perfume from certain areas on behalf of those who suffer
from multiple chemical sensitivities. The newspaper noted that this move may mark the
beginning of a national chemical correctness revolution. An organization called the
Human Ecology Action League has declared: "Perfume is going to be the tobacco
smoke of tomorrow." To those who want to make America scent-free, perfume vapor,
like nicotine smoke, is a mephitic poison in the nose, like the smell of a reeky skunk
(Latin, mephitis). To those sickened by its mephitis, perfume is a foul exhalation
impurely emitted from bodies drenched in its stench. Mephistopheles, who stinks like
Hell, takes his name from the skunk.
Perfume is threatening because it is so insinuating. Tlie anti-scent movement had a
notable success a couple of years ago when it forced Tlie New Yorker to stop running
scent strips in perfume ads. The magazine caved under the movement's strongest
argument, that the strips represented a harmful intrusion into the lives of the chemically
sensitive. The magazine issued a statement saying it would alter its policy out of
concern for those who "were not comfortable smelling fragrance throughout the issue."
The crucial word here seems to be "throughout." The dream of advertisers is a scent
strip whose spray would be so precisely aimed that its fragrance would last only as long
as it took to sniff and turn the page. But in fact the reader had no way of escaping the
smell throughout the issue, for perfume's very nature is to leak; its power of expansion
defies editorial control. Though perfume may impose itself casually or with willful
audacity, it is always unavoidable. Perfume never gives the smeller a chance.
Smell has a long history of condemnation. During the eighteenth century, the naturalist
Buffon, following Aristotle, called smell the most animalistic of the senses and like
Kant he disparaged it. It was not until Freud that this old story was set on its head.
Freud's suspicion was aroused by the forces allied against smell. In a characteristic
move, he reversed the hierarchy of the senses and in one of his most daring
speculations argued that smell's higher truth was being concealed with the force of a
taboo.
.................................
That truth, however, should not keep us from acknowledging that there are times when
armpits can be dynamite. It depends on your tastes and theirs. Historian Alain Corbin
recounts in The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the Social Imagination that Henry iii,
King of France, was reputed to have been smitten his whole life with Marie de Cleves
after he entered a room where she had just been changing and smelled the odor that still
clung to her chemise.
Sensitivity to strong odor varies widely from culture to culture. Oily me French could
eat a whole truffle. The odor of it in our noses would be overwhelming. But a few
slivers in your scrambled eggs and you can sniff the wind in the old trees. The French,
at least since Baudelaire, are persuaded there are no absolutely bad or good smells. The
poet wrote that the strongest, most disagreeable smell, if sufficiently diluted, can
become divine, whereas the most heavenly perfume smells to hell when it's too
concentrated.
Compared with the French, we have little tolerance for excremental scent. A great
burgundy, it is commonly said in France, has a distinct, albeit distant odor of pig merde.
The French love the smell of everything that belongs to organs and intestines. French
noses thrill at the pissy perfume of cooking kidneys; they love to hang their wild ducks
for a week or more before roasting, curing them until they've reached the pungent edge
of putrefaction. Sex among the French is preoccupied, often obsessed, with anality;
here we focus on breasts, a national fixation analyzed decades ago by Philip Wylie.
The predominance of oral as distinct from anal fixations in American culture seems to
require excessively repressive taboos on all dark and disturbing smells. America's
romance is still with milk�with consuming the white fat of that infinitely pure,
all-forgiving, scarcely odorous maternal gift.
Of course, America has its own special tribal relations to strong smell. In The Raw and
the Cooked, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss tells the story of a platoon of
Americans passing by the mouth of a cave in Normandy during World War ii. The
stench issuing from it was so appalling that they used a flamethrower to incinerate what
they were sure must be rotting corpses. The truth they discovered was that these caves
belonged to the Roquefort cooperative and were brimming with the aging moldy
cheese. Levi-Strauss noted the cultural difference: what a French nose knows to be the
sharp effluvia of delicious ripening is evidence to a g.i. nose of carrion flesh. Or
perhaps it is the American taboo on death that makes us hate the smell of any strong
odors. Any time we smell a dark smell or even an intense one, it reminds us either of
our animality or our mortality. In a way, tliese are the same thing. The poet Archie
Ammons once said that America is always trying to hide the stencil of death� anything
that speaks of putrefaction, of our body's partial transformation from solid liquid into
gas. The taboo on strong smells must reflect some deeper irrational fear. As if sniffing
could kill us, the way the mysterious odor that arose from the body of a dying woman
in Riverside, California, sickened the doctors and nurses who treated her. Even
perfumes devised to mask the smell of our rot participate in it; they can't help evoking
the very vile odor their beautiful fragrance conceals.
Throughout North America, intense shame surrounds smelling bad. Psychologists note
that people with real or imagined congenital odors are among their most deeply
troubled patients. The head of a Canadian clinic specializing in treating chronic bad
breath remarked that the condition is devastating. "Clients complain of rocky
marriages, continual rejection at job interviews or lost promotion opportunities," he told
the Montreal Gazette. Many people, particularly women, dread speaking about intimate
odors, and those most ashamed are least likely to seek help for what is often a medical
problem: bacterial and fungal infections. To smell bad is to be permanently disqualified
from being fully human, too close to being an animal. In America, the sweet smell of
success has no smell; as a nation we dream of being odor-free. Perhaps we Americans
do not smell because we aspire to be like money, which rarely smells. "Pecunia non
olet," replied the Emperor Vespasian when it was suggested to him that it might be
unseemly to put a tax on public toilets. A piece of gold, after all, can emerge even from
a cloaca. Our antiperspirants and deodorants let us play or work as hard or as hot as we
want, and, like gold, remain dry and cool. It has not always been a shame to have
persistent b.o. When people bathed less, the ammoniac smell of semen surrounded
certain men with an unmistakable scent, which signaled the vigor of their phallic
existence. The so-called aura seminalis was said to attract women.
Louis xiv, the Sun King, loved only women who smelled powerfully bad. The worse
they stank the better he liked them. He particularly favored redheads, who were reputed
to have an excess of blood and thus smelled the strongest. He himself reeked horribly,
as the reports of many ambassadors attest. The king abhorred the bath and considered it
unhealthy. He saw himself, like many aristocrats with ancestral ties to the land, as a
demi-peasant who wanted sex to smell the way it does with animals. But we Americans
want the opposite. Scentlessness is civility, though exceptions are still made for a
certain class of Englishmen or Anglophiles who believe not much in bathing.
Louis was not alone in being aroused by bad smells. Plebeians as well as aristocrats
can find them moving. There are many who love the smell of excrement, who are
seduced by it and praise it. After all, it is the most democratic smell, the one tfiat tells
the truth of our universal condition. Our elementary humanity is so insistently present in
that smell that Voltaire adduced it as an argument against the Incarnation, arguing that
no God would ever allow Himself to defecate. A Christian might reply that it is
precisely in that respect, as well, that He, with divine humility, became one of us. Born
in a manger. He doubtless understood the smells of the barnyard.
The sublimity of what smells bad may best be grasped if one credits the widely
circulated rumor that some of the greatest perfumes derive their most troubling strains
from excretions. These are not only glandular secretions such as musk from the penis of
male deer, ambergris disgorged by whales or sensuous smelling civet, deposited in anal
pouches by the eponymous Ethiopian cat, whose scent was beloved by Cleopatra.
Perfumes may, in addition, bear the notes of urine, semen, blood and even feces. Some
activists want the fda, which regulates perfumes, to require its manufacturers to list the
ingredients. Needless to say, the perfumers are resisting mightily, reluctant to invite the
suspicion they are selling Eau de Merde or Air d'Urine. And yet the highest form of
their art may well consist in their ability to exploit excremental notes that are the most
troubling to the American nose, in ways that both disguise the source of the trouble and
mine it for its power to incite a shiver of long repressed carnality. Oddly, the cadre
demanding labeling for perfume has remained small; there has been no public uproar.
Maybe our noses know implicitly some of the ingredients, which we would just as soon
not consciously know anything about.
Are Americans becoming more hysterical or just more sensitized to odor? ........................
Conversely, it may be that the scent-free movement represents a moment in an often
repeated historical cycle. Changes in taste in perfume since the seventeenth century
have always been linked to political changes. After Louis xiv, the aristocracy adopted
the more enlightened English models of hygiene and favored the most delicate floral
scents. With the French Revolution, the aroma of lily�the king's fleur-de-lis�worn as
perfume was enough to send its enthusiasts to the guillotine. Napoleon and Josephine,
who came from Martinique and loved tropical scents, wrote intimate letters to one
another expressing their pleasure in each other's bodily smells. The fashion for strong
animal-based perfumes was reinforced by the taste for antiquity that characterized the
Napoleonic Empire. Being rubbed and oiled with musk made the new aristocrats in the
Tuilleries think they were Roman citizens at the baths. With the Restoration, strong
perfume fell out of fashion. Tobacco and camphor, extolled by doctors for their
therapeutic value, became the scents of choice.
Perfume returned in the middle of the nineteenth century, but less powerfully, more
harmoniously. Queen Victoria was the object of ridicule among the dandies of the
Second Empire, who claimed to have detected an undercurrent of musk in the perfume
she wore on an official visit to Paris in 1855. At the court of Napoleon's nephew,
animal smells were taboo. Americans at the turn of the century were notorious, for their
strong perfumes; a Parisian could tell instantly when an American woman walked into a
room. Two years ago, Aromatique, a home fragrance company, and the maker of
Smells of Christmas, Spring, Summer and Autumn, added Smells of Arkansas to its
line. "It evokes lovely memories of wonderful afternoons in the woods," the company's
owner told The Dallas Morning News. No word how it's doing, or whether the
residents of Washington are watering their roots with it.
The present movement to make America scent-free may be only the most radical
expression of a turn in the cycle of scent, away from the strong perfumes toward barely
detectable "fresh" fragrances. Nobody knows exactly what fresh is, but everybody
wants it. Some perfumes try to capture it by imitating the peppery odor of ozone when
it swirls up from the lip of a waterfall and sharpens the smell of the air. Others evolve
into minty notes with an undertone of camphor to startle the nose. Some exploit the
scent of pine, which masks other odors with its penetrating woody note. If scent is not
shortly prohibited, you can bet it's swinging, under the new more pious regime, in the
direction of being the barest whiff of me purest air. The designer Issey Miyake wanted
a note for his Eau d'lssey that was "kind of translucent. New Age, sparkling water-the
... way the bottle looks aesthetically." Perfume is on the way to becoming so fresh that
it has mainly the odor of the look of the clear bottle that contains it. The designer
dreams of perfume that doesn't smell but looks good.
It has often been observed that humans smell like cheese. Patrick Susskind writes that
babies' feet smell "like fresh butter. And their bodies smell like ... a griddle cake that's
been soaked in milk." Americans, raised on milk, are probably the cheesiest smelling
people on earth. Perhaps that's why we eat so little of it, except when it's included in
something else. The French, who eat a lot of cheese, rarely drink milk. They mostly
smell like wine.
If the Americans and French smell different, then do other nations have a characteristic
smell? Many have claimed they do. Their supposed scent is rarely ever perceived as a
particularly good one. Racism has always been predicated on the belief that one could
detect the characteristic smell of another race. At the turn of the century, a French Dr.
Cabanes described the bland odor of the English, a mixture of leather and seaweed, that
often remained in a room for several years. Around the same time, a distinguished
Japanese scholar. Dr. Buntaro Adachi, denounced the stench of Occidentals. (He may
have had a point. Japanese are without the gland that produces apocrine, the principle
source of underarm odor.) A Dr. Berillon, in 1915, during the First World War, wrote a
much-heralded treatise on the fetid odor of Germans. Racist scientific claims about
Africans can already be found in 1896, when a certain Jean Lorrain wrote that the
"odor of the Negro is like rancid butter and pepper." Berillon went so far as to argue
that smell formed the basis of racial hatred in America. Nothing, he believed, can
overcome its olfactory antagonisms.
I disagree, hi fact, I have my own proposal for a kind of political aromatherapy. Start
from the premise, which is my conclusion, that what smells bad can, in another context,
smell good and vice versa. To wit: body odor, if it's new, is a pheromone; it was
probably designed by our genes to attract, not repulse. Being new, it has not yet
acquired the deep rancid note that emerges after a day or so without bathing. My
proposal, then, is this: If you ever encounter "bad" body odor that your nose tells you
doesn't come from habits of uncleanliness, but is freshly born of physical exertion or
nervous energy, try standing it. Seize the opportunity to struggle with your repressions.
Smell again. With little rabbit sniffs, take a whiff of the other's smell. Then, in
retro-smell. Try to remember or re-nose it, while you do the work of finding other
good odors it resembles. In the end, if you can allow yourself to stand somebody's
smell, you might find your antipathy turning into something like pleasure, maybe love.
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