The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent. Denyse Beaulieu
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father was far from alone in his indictment of perfume: though his aversion was probably due to his hyper-sensitivity rather than to moral or philosophical reasons, he was in fact only following in the footsteps of a long line of male authority figures. Philosophers, priests and physicians had been railing for centuries against it, cursing women for snatching it from the altars of the gods and diverting it for erotic purposes.
The Ancient Greeks were the first to sound the alarm on fragrant substance abuse. Perfume was the potent lure used by the enchantress Circe to ensnare the wily Ulysses while she turned his companions into swine, and by the courtesans who diverted the fruitful union of man and woman in their sterile embraces … A measured, reasonable use of scent could stimulate desire, the wise men granted, hence its use in wedding rituals, but the operational word was ‘measured’. In The Republic, Plato warns against ‘clouds of incense and perfumes and garlands and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life’ that turn ‘the sting of desire’ into madness. Man must not be led by lust and, though a drop of sweet-smelling stuff might promote marital harmony, an excessive use of it disrupted the balance between mind and body. Though the very nature of perfume was divine because all beauty springs from the divine, explains the historian Jean-Pierre Vernant in The Gardens of Adonis, ‘in erotic seduction it is diverted, led astray, directed towards a pretence of the divine, a misleading appearance of beauty concealing a very different reality: feminine bestiality.’
But it was for its wastefulness rather than its immorality that the hard-nosed Roman empire condemned it. ‘Perfumes form the objects of a luxury which may be looked upon as being the most superfluous of any, for pearls and jewels, after all, do pass to a man’s representative, and garments have some durability, but unguents lose their odour in an instant, and die away the very hour they are used,’ grumbles Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. ‘The very highest recommendation of them is, that when a female passes by, the odour which proceeds from her may possibly attract the attention of those even who till then are intent upon something else.’ Talk about damning with faint praise.
As for the Old Testament, it is lush with fragrance – ‘My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts,’ says the ‘dark but comely’ bride of the Song of Songs. And the New Testament does feature two fragrant episodes: in the first, an unnamed sinner washes Jesus’ feet with her tears before anointing them with precious oils. In the second, it is Mary of Bethany who pours costly spikenard on his head in anticipation of his funeral rites. Even then, there’s male grumbling, since Judas considers the money would have been better spent on helping the poor. But as a rule, Christianity dealt much more harshly with scents. They were part of pagan rituals, especially the highly popular imported Asian religions which competed with the new Christian cult in the Late empire; worse still, they could induce men to sin. Not only did Christian women need to distinguish themselves from the pagans who marinated themselves in scent, but they should strive to make themselves ugly so they wouldn’t arouse lust, urged Tertullian in the 2nd century. Woman was ‘the gateway of the Devil’ and by adorning herself, she not only led fellow Christians astray: she defaced the work of God. The body was contemptible and so were bodily pleasures. The only sweet smell was that of a spotless soul. Sin stank.
For the Church, saints were the only beings whose corpses didn’t exhale the stench of corruption which was the destiny of all living creatures. Their mortal remains were said to give off suave effluvia years or even centuries after their death: the odour of sanctity. Conversely, the strongest stench was raised by the ultimate sinner, the heiress of the temptress Eve whose wiles caused humanity to be cast from the Garden of Eden: the whore.
The etymology of many Latin language words for ‘whore’ (pute in French) is derived from putere, ‘to stink’. Prostitutes, it was believed, wore fragrance both to attract their prey and to cover up the emanations of the male secretions festering inside their bodies, venom they spread from lover to lover. When the olfactory-obsessed Émile Zola writes about the courtesan Nana in the eponymous book, he calls her ‘that Golden Creature, blind as brute force, whose very odour ruined the world’, even though, when he does mention her favourite scent, it is the mawkish violet. But her streetwalking counterparts would have wafted headier aromas such as musk or patchouli as olfactory advertisement for their wares.
The association between the putrid puta and her fragrance abuse is embedded in the subconscious perception of perfume, but in 1932, the owner of the Spanish perfume house of Dana went straight to the point when he asked Jean Carles to compose a perfume de puta, a ‘whore’s perfume’ – surely the raunchiest brief in history. He called the orange blossom, carnation and patchouli blend Tabu, the ‘forbidden’ perfume, after Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
Think of it the next time you spritz on a juice called Obsession, Addict, Poison or Aromatics Elixir. You’re not just doing it to smell good: you’re perpetuating a ritual of erotic magic that’s been scaring and enticing men in equal measure for millennia.
8
It wasn’t about the smell back when I was a teenager. It was about the ads.
In my all-girl Catholic private school, my classmates had nicknamed me ‘The Dictionary’ because I used words they didn’t understand. I was an outcast, and magazines were my only access to the stuff they talked about at break, my only clue to becoming a woman. Worse still, my body had declared war on me, growing tall and sprouting fat so quickly I was striped with purple stretch-mark welts all over, and perpetually falling flat on my face because my centre of gravity kept changing location. Not only was I a geek, but I’d become a chubby, bespectacled geek. Fourteen sucked.
My best friend Sylvie was ostracized for the opposite reasons. The other girls called her ‘La Guidoune’, a Québécois slang term for slut. They sniggered at the blowsy D-cup breasts that tugged her blouses open on her greying bra, her rats’-nest hair, occasional bouts of funkiness after gym, and the way she sprawled behind her desk, knees and lips parted, staring at her chipped nail polish. But I envied her the way her breasts rolled and bobbed under her nylon blouses, the boys from the vocational school who hung around a block down to pick her up after class, and even the sovereign vacancy with which she greeted anything that didn’t have to do with beautification. My own mind was a jumble of the things I’d read and was trying to make sense of; my only-child life was boyless, since my freckled next-door neighbour Jeffrey was a hockey-obsessed jock and Jacob, two doors down, was only willing to bond over his pet iguana: I was the sole girl on the block who didn’t run away shrieking when he slid its head into his mouth.
Lunch breaks with Sylvie meant greasy brown vinegar-doused chips bought from a trailer and lengthy browses in Woolworth’s cosmetics aisles. In a burst of teenage rebelliousness, I’d decided to transgress the paternal ban and buy my first bottle of perfume with my babysitting money, a purchase discussed at length with my best friend during break. I’d whittled down my options to three possibilities after studying the ads. The one for Revlon’s Charlie, ‘The Gorgeous, Sexy-Young Fragrance’, featured a grinning model striding confidently in a trouser suit. I rather fancied being a freewheeling career woman with legs a mile long, but Sylvie pulled a face.
‘She looks like that stupid guy on the Johnny Walker bottle.’
With its faux-fur cap, Tigress by Fabergé spoke to my worship of all things feline and reminded me of The Sensuous Woman’s advice on leopard skin-patterned sheets. The ad intrigued me: a gorgeous black woman on all fours wearing a tiger-print body suit and a slight smirk. ‘Tigress. Because men are such animals.’
‘Uh-uh. Get that one.’
Sylvie pointed a frosty-pink nail towards ‘Love’s Baby Soft. Because innocence is sexier than you think.’ Today the ad, a pouting girl clutching a white teddy bear while fully made-up and coiffed though she couldn’t be more than twelve, would have child-protection leagues tear down the offices of Menley & James Laboratories brick by brick. Even back then I found it creepy. I was innocent in body if not in mind: ‘J’ had made sure of that, and the theoretical knowledge she’d imparted fuelled my reveries of teenybopper idols like The Partridge Family’s David Cassidy. Along with Jovan’s Musk, Love’s Baby Soft was the most popular fragrance at school and perhaps the key to some