It’s one of my favourite times of year again: entreating people to
SUBMIT TO THE STATE. This third issue is themed
The Social Olfactory; seems as good a time as any to unshelve this ‘elsewhere on the printernet…’ series. In the way that some women cop to
indulging in Mormon housewife blogs, I’ve found myself spending the past year or so reading about perfume. In the months since, I’ve added florist blogs to the roster, but there’s something about perfume, especially, that feels especially mysterious, intimate, beguiling. I’m charmed, too, by the corporealised ‘notes’ that make up any formulation—head notes, heart notes, base notes. And so, for this week, and perhaps the next few until the August 22 submissions deadline, here’s some reads on smell and scent. If all else fails, there
is a blinged-out hippo at stage right.
Coming of Age: an American Perfume Story—Suzanna Mars, Bois de Jasmine, 2012
“It is a few weeks before Christmas of 1978 and my grandmother and I are standing in front of an Elizabeth Arden counter in Bonwit Teller as she purchases a face powder. My grandmother, a tiny woman in a doll-sized mink hat, likes to chat and to take her time making purchases. While she and the sales assistant debate the merits of a rosy powder over a beige one, I wander off to another counter. I am too young to care about face powder but I am not too young to investigate the contents of the bottles of perfume that each counter has displayed in a prominent place.”
Engineering Replacements for Essential Perfume Ingredients—Courtney Humphries, Wired, 2011
“To connoisseurs, poorly reformulated perfume is like badly rendered CGI: The surface details may seem accurate, but the substance has been hollowed out. Perfumes have scent structures, and once you become intimate with those structures it’s easy to perceive the absence of a crucial room or — worse — a crack in the foundation.”
On the Scent—Emily Gould, Paris Review, 2012
“ Sanchez leans more towards narrative than Turin: Ormonde Woman “has the haunting, outdoors witchiness of tall pines leaning into the night—a bitter oakmoss inkiness, a dry cedar crackle, and a low, delicious, pleading sweet amber, like the call of a faraway candy house.” Turin is more likely to imagine a fragrance embodied as a human, usually as a female: “Catherine Deneuve is speaking fluent Arabic” in Jubilation 25, Equistrius is “as effortlessly classy as a pale young girl with violet eyes,” while Frangipane is “blandly pretty and just interesting enough to stand out without disturbing anyone, like a young socialite who takes a Latin dance course and ever after is known as the daring one in her set..”
Scent as Design—Eva Wisten, Seed, 2010
“Scent emerges as an exciting realm for design exploration precisely at a time when the dematerialization of technology seem to be leading us further away from direct sensory experiences. Modernist architecture and design has attempted to banish all odors through new finishes, air control systems, and antiseptic surfaces, our digital future seems to hold no place for the vicissitudes of aromas, fragrances, and stink. At the same time, however, exciting new science is exploring the ways in which scent stimulates cognition, memory, and the production of experience.”
The Smelliest Block in New York—Molly Young, New York Magazine, 2011
“Sewer workers in 1910 had a nickname for the mold that grew in Lower East Side sewers. “Lace curtains,” they called it, because the stuff was white and draped prettily across the sewer arcs. At a time when the city was steeped in filth—children romped in the slime of horse troughs, industrial rendering plants rendered—the Lower East Side was exceptional for its grease deposits, and smelled persistently of shit. There are no lace curtains to be found a century later, as the price of an apartment on Orchard Street indicates. If there’s any scent at all in 2011, it’s the scent of discretionary income: of gluten-free doughnuts, premium jeggings, artisanal cigars.”
The Sniff of Legend—Karen Wright, Discover, 1994
“’I can see it right . . . there,’ says Monti-Bloch, pointing with a cotton swab. He adjusts the loupes, his gaze never straying from Murray’s mucosa. He sighs. “It’s really beautiful.” Monti-Bloch is one of half a dozen distinguished scientists who believe they’ve discovered a new sense organ half an inch or so inside the human nose. It’s called the vomeronasal organ, or VNO, and if the hunches of these researchers are correct, it detects chemical signals passed unconsciously among human beings–signals that might be about identity, arousal, or sexual receptivity and that go by the name of pheromones. Such chemical communication, common among other animals, was heretofore thought to be nonexistent in humans.”
You’ve got smell!—Charles Platt, Wired, 2009
“Dutifully, I reinitialize my nose by sniffing the beans. I’m preparing for a sensory epiphany here, an epochal event in the history of art, smell, and computation. Bellenson and Smith claim they’ve developed a highly secret process to encode odors as digital data. Just as we can download digitized music and play it through speakers attached to a computer, we should soon be able to acquire online scent data that a little gadget can play back as smells. Bellenson, who sounds edgy and looks sleep-deprived, has been pitching his new paradigm to me with the manic charisma of an infomercial host. The way he sees it, “scentography” is going to transform the entertainment-media spectrum, all the way from Web surfing to Hollywood movies.”
Image via deadscope
