Every morning before work, I spritz myself with a misty blast from a bottle marked “bourbon vanilla.” I’ve never really given much thought to why I do this. But I do know I’m not alone. Countless people put on some sort of intentional scent before they head out into the world.
Saskia Wilson-Brown has thought a lot about this. She’s the founder and executive director of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, an organization dedicated to expanding public awareness about the culture of smell. She and her team are particularly interested in the work of independent, artisan, and experimental practices with scent.
Their work dovetails with a recent New York Times report on the booming market for alternative perfumes. As the Times put it, “Although the mainstream perfume business has long run on seduction, celebrity and the idea that a person must have a signature scent, a burgeoning countermovement, driven by independent artisans, is questioning the idea that a perfume’s central function is to delight the noses of others.”
Saskia joined The Show to discuss what she made of that report and said much of this experimental spirit can be traced to an internet culture that encourages people to re-examine preconceived notions about all sorts of human expression — from music to movies to colognes and perfumes.
Full conversation
SASKIA WILSON-BROWN: The folks that started examining perfume started to rightfully question why it was that we were all meant to wear flowers if we were girls and — whatever — resins if we were boys and started to re-examine that completely by making sense that were designed only to delight themselves and their own curiosities and their own sense of self.
SAM DINGMAN: Do you wear perfume yourself?
WILSON-BROWN: Oh, well, I mean, I wear multiple perfumes all the time.
DINGMAN: What are some of your favorite scents to wear?
WILSON-BROWN: You know, I've been really interested in some fragrances that are, I guess, considered maybe a little bit odd from a classical perspective, like a brand called BeauFort London. All of his scents have this very specific aesthetic, which is a little bit darkwave, if I could describe it in one word. They're a little bit smoky and a little bit rough. And I wouldn't say that they're pretty, but they're definitely interesting.
DINGMAN: When you put on, say a darkwave scent like that, do you think you could describe the conscious effect it has on you? I ask because I started wearing cologne at some point because I associated it with a sense of a certain type of man that I thought I wanted to be. It was like finished, you know what I mean? It was around the time that I started thinking, “you know, I should get my haircut every six weeks,” and “I should wear collared shirts every day.” And there was something about cologne that felt like the last step in that process.
WILSON-BROWN: Oh, 100%. And, and so I echo that narrative. When I was a young teenage girl, I sort of started to think, “What is a woman?” You know, “what does a woman wear?”
And I also had the same narrative as you, I started or the same thought process as you, you know, you wear certain clothes and at some point, you put on a perfume because that's what the ladies smell like and you want to be a lady. So as we age and our sense of identity evolves, we get to explore different aspects of ourselves.
So, for me wearing something by BeauFort it is wearing something that is explores a different aspect of my personality. It also conveys something different to the people around me versus, “Oh, I want to be a lady and I want you to think I'm attractive.” It says, “Hey, I'm a complex being with stormy brains” or whatever. I mean, it can say all sorts of things that are a little bit more complex than, “Oh, look at me I'm a pretty girl.”
DINGMAN: You know what, I'm just realizing as we're talking about this — and I wonder if you have any relationship with this — is I think maybe on some level, I don't know if it was conscious, but the reason that I started wearing cologne is it almost strikes me as a way to be remembered. People remember the smells of places they've been or foods they liked or things that they have a positive relationship with. And I think on some level it, it occurred to me that if somebody remembered, “oh, yeah, I met that guy once he smelled good,” they might be less quick to forget me.
WILSON-BROWN: Yeah, for sure. I mean, isn't all human expression a desire not to be forgotten, you know?
DINGMAN: Yeah. I mean, obviously one's sense of smell and what smells good to someone is extremely personal and is built out of a whole host of factors. What are some of the things that go into what we respond to favorably when we smell something that we're maybe not thinking about when we have a positive reaction?
WILSON-BROWN: I think the thing we most commonly don't think about is how culture plays its part. So in some cultures, for instance, the smell of the body is more accepted than others. In the US, in particular, we've been sort of marketed deodorants from the early 20th century. And that marketing strategy was overtly and admittedly built on instilling in people a sense of shame about how they smelled.
I think people forget that, and a lot of the narratives around what smells good and smells bad, if you pick them apart, you definitely come down to othering. When you have a dominant culture and you have a culture that is perceived as lesser by that dominant culture, oftentimes that language is spoken through smell. “Those people smell bad,” “their food smells bad,” “they don't wash,” blah, blah, blah.
But if you just take a little bit of a curious nose to that and you remove the judgment, what you observe is this is just a smell. You know, there's nothing wrong with any smell. It's just how you react to it really.
DINGMAN: Well, so I, you know, I think a lot of that history and reality helps explain things like floral scents that were associated with women and maybe like, I don't know, earthy muskier forms of cologne that that men used to wear.
But, let's talk a little bit about the journey from those to some of the fragrances that we can find now — you were alluding to one earlier with the BeauFort Line. I was just looking up a couple here that I wanted to run by you, one is a scent called Inexcusable Evil.
WILSON-BROWN: By Toskovat.
DINGMAN: Yes. Oh, so you're familiar?
WILSON-BROWN: I'm familiar. Oh, yes.
DINGMAN: It says the top notes are gunpowder and ozone. The heart notes are blood, bandages, iodine, burning flowers, fallen concrete, rain, incense and sandalwood. Talk a little bit about the thought process in assembling a scent like that.
WILSON-BROWN: Well, I mean, this particular perfume was assembled as a sort of political statement as to what's going on in the world. Human misbehavior, war, evil. You know what we do to each other and all the sense, all the sent notes that you describe are designed to elucidate that. It's a political and it's an artistic statement, and it's not always pleasant — much like art isn't always pleasant — but it makes a point.
DINGMAN: It's kind of an audacious idea, the idea that you would wear a scent like this and it, you know, it, it's doubtful. I would imagine that you could walk up to somebody wearing Inexcusable Evil and stand next to them and say, “Is that the smell of fallen concrete? Boy, there's a lot of genocide happening,” you know?
WILSON-BROWN: I mean, not your common perfume narrative for sure.
DINGMAN: But I could imagine standing next to somebody wearing that and having them say, “I'm so sorry that that scent you're wearing is so interesting. Tell me more about it,” and then that becomes an invitation to have that conversation.
WILSON-BROWN: Exactly. And, and so the perfumer whose name is David-Lev is from Romania. And that was the point.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, one more I wanted to run by you is called Funerie and this is by Pinewood Perfume. And the sent notes here are rites of the dead, a shroud of bleakness, feasting fungi and wilted roses nestle atop charred pine boards and a base of heavy resins, morel mushroom, decayed rose, blood cedar, rotting wood. What do you make of wanting to evoke death?
WILSON-BROWN: Yeah. Well, so I think that death is a reality. And I think that traditionally in perfumery, we would have done everything to avoid that reality, because who wants to be confronted with death? We'd rather just smell nice. So there's this sort of small subset of indie perfumes that explore death — typically in metaphor, as this one does, I might add because the real smell of death is not in this fragrance. I can guarantee you that.
DINGMAN: Right, yeah.
WILSON-BROWN: Look, it's humans making sense of our human condition with all the tools we have at our disposal. And I think it's cool that perfume has evolved to the point where we can do that now.
DINGMAN: Yes, but it just occurs to me based on what you said that even in a scent like Funerie, we still can't resist romanticizing it a little bit.
WILSON-BROWN: Absolutely. I mean, this is definitely the realm of metaphor. I mean, at least that's what I'd say perfumers hope you know, I mean religion, power, sensuality, you name it. It all has an olfactory narrative.
