A fragrance that sends one woman into a pleasure-swoon might make another hold her nose. What creates the perfect match is a stroke of alchemical luck.
We may be drawn to a perfume for many reasons: because it reminds us of a garden—or a person—we once loved; because we hope it will reduce all men who cross our path to helpless, love-struck fools. It’s difficult to imagine reaching for a scent thinking, Here is a fragrance that will put people off. Yet a quick glance at the discussion boards on juice-junkie sites such as Nstperfume.com or Basenotes.net will verify that a perfume that sends one person into raptures of delight is practically guaranteed to be someone else’s eau no. Just as some will linger in the wake of a cigar with noses aloft while others flee its acrid aftermath, we all experience scent differently.
The prevailing theory about why we love or hate certain smells is that scents attach to positive or negative moments in our lives, since the region of the brain that processes odor cozies up to the area tied to memory. So someone may love the sharp green whiff of fresh-cut grass that characterizes Issey Miyake’s A Scent because it conjures mental postcards of childhood vacations, while someone else may hate the smell because she associates it with the sweaty toil of having to mow lawns. There’s new research, though, to indicate that we might be hardwired to appreciate or detest at least some smells: A paper published in Public Library of Science Computational Biology in April 2010 by neurobiologist Rafi Haddad of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, showed that when a robotic “e-nose” rated scents on a scale from pleasant to unpleasant, its assessments were 90 percent aligned with ratings by both Ethiopian and Israeli human test subjects. Interestingly, many of the scents deemed most universally appealing in the study were those that regularly crop up as top notes in popular perfumes: grapefruit, bergamot, orange, lime, freesia, and mimosa—and many of the smells that rated lowest in the “pleasant” spectrum were those that provide the base notes (and, for some people, the ick factor), such as musk and patchouli.
For the perfumer, there are notes that are considered patently more difficult than others, just as there are those that are guaranteed crowd-pleasers. “Some notes are definitely more divisive than others,” says Kilian Hennessy, whose By Kilian range of perfumes includes A Taste of Heaven, which smells of absinthe and lavender, and Love, which leads off with a heady whiff of marshmallow. “For example, we know that leather notes are much more polarizing than citrus notes. Gardenia and tuberose are more polarizing than light florals such as lily of the valley, lilac, or fresh rose. Animalic notes are also very polarizing. The heavier you go, the more the essential oil is going to have a texture, and the more difficult it’s going to be to wear.” Perfumer Calice Becker, a noted nose at fragrance house Givaudan who created the aforementioned By Kilian perfumes, as well as such celebrated blockbusters as Tommy Girl, Dior J’Adore, and Marc Jacobs’ Lola, says, “For the broader market, a perfume will often feature fresh, fruity notes—or vanilla, which is an international favorite. Its components will be constructed in a certain way, like in the movie industry, where you must have a little bit of romance, a little bit of sex, and a little bit of action, with each part lasting the right amount of time to please the most people. With mass perfumes, it’s the same: We go for the stars that we know everyone likes.”
Historically, says Vera Strubi, the former president of Thierry Mugler Parfums who was instrumental in the 1992 launch of Angel, the perfumes that have managed to be both wildly successful and deeply divisive have been those with an intentional imbalance—an “overdose” of something. “If you have something very well balanced, it might be beautiful or nice, but you’ll also forget about it,” she says. That’s precisely why many of the last century’s most iconic fragrances were reviled as often as they were adored when they first appeared on the market: Think of Shalimar’s woozily dense vanilla, Angel’s walloping dose of patchouli, Opium’s spice den of cloves and cinnamon. Even the seemingly universally liked CK One hit the market as a bit of a shocker in the ’90s, because Americans hadn’t yet smelled such a strong hit of citrus in anything other than cleaning products. “Mr. Mugler said, ‘I would like to create a classic,’” remembers Strubi. “So I looked into the fragrance business and discovered that the perfumes that have stood the test of time have one thing in common: They have a lot of character. That’s when I realized that if you want a fragrance to be memorable, it can’t please everybody.” Angel famously took years to gain momentum, but it’s now one of the most popular fragrances in the world. As the first juice to employ delectable edible notes—in this case the syrupy sweet caramel and chocolate that temper the earthy, voluptuous patchouli—it not only sparked countless copycats, it established a new perfume genre, the oriental gourmand.
Similarly, when Shalimar was launched at the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in 1925, it caused a sensation—not least because it was worn by Madame Raymond Guerlain, who “had a devastating effect on men,” says Sylvaine Delacourte, director of fragrance evaluation and development at Guerlain. It was considered so provocative that “Good girls don’t smoke, dance the tango, or wear Shalimar” became a popular saying during the late ’20s in Europe. “The construction was very unique because it had fresh, happy top notes, but then you’d get the overdose of vanilla combined with leather and animalistic notes,” Delacourte says. “Vanilla is erotic by itself, but when you add those other notes, it becomes a sex bomb. No one had smelled anything like it before.”
Over the past decade, the more shocking scents have largely been created by niche perfumers who cater to the juice-obsessed customer. Rather than reach for consensus, they would prefer to spark the type of passionate opinions that will unspool on the aforementioned online message boards. “Fragrances are like cocktails—there are some you like and some you don’t,” says Christophe Cervasel, who founded the five-scent Atelier Cologne line in 2008 with Sylvie Ganter, who had formerly worked for Fresh and Hermès. “People tend to go through our collection very quickly and say, ‘This is the fragrance for me.’ No one likes them all.”
But while bigger companies have become increasingly apt to go for sure things—celebrity scents, for example, are designed to be immediately likable so that they will sell as quickly and widely as possible—that doesn’t mean intriguing scents are the exclusive domain of niche brands. For example, Tom Ford (many of whose scents are envelope-pushers), Chanel, Cartier, and D&G have all released fragrance anthologies in which easier-to-wear fragrances sit alongside more challenging creations. (And, on the flip side, not all smaller brands hew strictly to the offbeat: Über-niche Serge Lutens’ recent L’Eau—a laundry-fresh, sudsy-smelling concoction—was a targeted strike at the straightforward, widely appealing concept of clean.) Sometimes, too, a note is initially polarizing because it’s new—a recent example being oud, which is derived from a resin of rotten wood and suggestive of the earthy, warm olfactory sensation you’d get by pressing your nose to the forest floor. While it has been a favorite in the Middle East for centuries, oud has only recently crept into Western perfumery, now turning up in everything from Tom Ford’s Oud Wood to Bond No. 9 Perfume Oud to Jo Malone Oud & Bergamot.
It takes moxie to anoint yourself with something that you know your neighbor might find repellent, but at the same time, we all dream of finding a signature scent that perfectly distills our personality—and that, no doubt, is the allure of polarizing scents, whether they be niche or mass. As Serge Lutens so nicely puts it: “I am not in favor of silent majority perfumery, and I am not in favor of loud minority perfumery. I am in favor of a perfumery of individuality where each self is expressed.”
Ultimately, it behooves all of us to seek out and surround ourselves with a scent we truly love—whether it’s one that is redolent of woodsmoke and gin or a field of glorious white freesia. “When exposed to smells that they love, people become happier and more positive toward other people. They listen better and are more agreeable,” says Alan Hirsch, MD, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. “Conversely, being exposed to a smell you hate can induce aggression, impair learning, and cause you to be more critical of others.” And of course there’s no need to feel limited to one eau: a person can have more than one signature scent, depending upon whim, mood, or time of day—which means there’s plenty of room for both polarizing and nonpolarizing perfumes to coexist. It’s like the difference between a cashmere sweater and a shocking pink dress: One is comfortable, the other a bit more of a statement piece—but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want both in your wardrobe.
“It’s a question of connection,” says Delacourte. “When you’re in perfect harmony with a perfume, it’s like meeting the right man: It’s obvious that you’ve found something that suits you very well.”
