Blood, Sweat, Sperm, Saliva

The Metro (dreadful free London paper) has a piece today on Sécrétions Magnifiques:

New perfume smells of semen and sweat

Want a scent with a distinct fragrance that no one else has?
Well, blood, sweat, saliva and a dollop of sperm is just the thing for the stinking rich, if a perfume on sale at Harvey Nichols is anything to go by.
The perfume, Sécrétions Magnifiques, contains the smell of all those things and still sells for £76 a pop.
Maker Etat Libre d'Orange markets it as a raunchy alternative to the likes of Poison and Chanel No.5, calling it 'subversive' and 'disturbing'.
The company said: 'It's love or hate at first sight. Like blood, sweat, sperm, saliva, Sécrétions Magnifiques is as real as an olfactory coitus that sends one into raptures, to the pinnacle of sensual pleasure.
'Tongues and sexes find one another, pleasure explodes and all goes wild.'
The perfume mixes accords - a blending of scents - to recreate the smell of blood, sweat, saliva and semen with the more pleasant odours of coconut and sandalwood. Perfume expert Roja Dove said the aroma was a refreshing alternative to bland fragrances.
'The kind of people who will like this range are people who think they are being really, really alternative and going against the establishment and being really rather racy,' he said.
'But it is a bit of a mystery why anyone would want to smell of sweat, blood, saliva and sperm.'
Another perfume in the range is Jasmin et Cigarette, which does exactly what it says on the tin, stinking of jasmine and uh, cigarettes.
A spokesman for Harvey Nichols, the only shop in the country to stock the range, insisted it was popular. 'Niche fragrances tend to do very well in our fragrance offering,' he said.

Well, this is the Metro we're talking about, so it's not like I expected quality journalism. But... really. Shall I complain first about the glaring factual errors (Harvey Nichols isn't the only shop in the country to sell the range - I was sniffing them in Les Senteurs just the other day) or the horrible writing (Jasmin et Cigarette does not stink of jasmine, thanks very much)? I almost can't decide. I should mention that the print edition of the paper had an extra subtitle for the article which claimed that the fragrance was made from semen and sweat. Nice work, guys.

Putting the journalistic crappiness of the Metro aside for a minute, this part interests me:

Perfume expert Roja Dove said... "But it is a bit of a mystery why anyone would want to smell of sweat, blood, saliva and sperm."

Did Roja Dove really say that, do you think? Dove is one of the world's leading experts on fragrance, so I seriously doubt that he finds body smells 'a bit of a mystery'. I should have thought he's encountered them before. In fact, he once described a fragrance as 'what it would smell like if you inserted your finger into a clean rectum and then sniffed it' - and he was selling that in his shop. Or is he just bad-mouthing Etat Libre d'Orange because Harvey Nichols is his main competitor?

There is, perhaps, a good reason why Dove might dismiss Etat Libre d'Orange's fragrances: it would be fair to accuse the company of prioritising style over substance. Those I smelled the other day weren't particularly great, smelling generic and uninteresting, even though I love the names. I suspect, though, that the most probable explanation for Dove's comment is that the Metro made it up.

A Little More On Perfume and Gender

I'd like to try and refract the powerful arguments Jicky has made below through the prism of masculine mainstream scent marketing to see what strange images can be conjured upon the wall. I use this general term "scent" rather than the more specific "perfume" for reasons I'll come to in a moment.

There is a great deal of truth in the suggestion that clean fragrances can be associated with the suppression of a woman's natural smell and can therefore seen as an instrument of control. Certainly until very recently the state of the union was that most women would wear mass-market perfume, generally something floral or slightly comestible and men would stink of old armpit. Today the same mass-market has shifted and men do now smell of something other than themselves. The trick in selling scent to men is twofold. Firstly, it must be seen to achieve some practical end, usually getting the wearer laid, and second, the scent must be contained within a product which is primarily used for something other than smelling pleasant, for example a deodorant.

The example which leaps inevitably to mind is, sadly, Unilever's Lynx range. This same range is known as Axe in the USA and much of the rest of the world. The brand was devised and launched in 1983 by Fabergé. It has been incredibly successful for Unilever, Fabergé's parent company ever since. Last year men with dysfunctional noses spent $7.3 bn on Lynx products worldwide. According to Unilever the target market for the range of deodorants, shower gels and so on is 18-24 year olds. Whilst many of the glossy men's magazines such as GQ and Esquire will feature expensive identikit adverts for fragrances from Tom Ford, Calvin Klein and Jean Paul Gaultier, these are perfumes aimed at slightly older, professional (read "richer") men. They cannot therefore be seen as a barometer of the mainstream. Lynx certainly can, the numbers do not lie.

Lynx is targeted at the reader of Nuts, FHM and The Sun newspaper: all massive selling publications. The key here is that Unilever do not make a perfume as part of the range, not even sneaking one by disguising it as "after shave". Every product is, first and foremost, something other than perfume. Perfume for perfume's own sake is still a worryingly feminine concept for many men but the paranoia that women will find you attractive only if you smell of something other than old sweat is all pervasive. In order to sell to these men you must employ a carpet bombing marketing strategy of providing a product they can feel confident about buying and mix that with advertisements that promise that its scent will get them some action. It is worth pointing out that Unilever's advertising concentrates entirely on the supposed effect of the scent, no mention is ever made of the product's qualities as a deodorant. Nonetheless, at no point may you suggest that a man might want to wear a scent for his own pleasure; that would be unmanly.

This strategy, bizarrely, often ends up with the same practical result as mass-market women's perfume, that of horribly ersatz, sinus stripping bleach-fresh fragrances with no hint of nature, sex or humanity about them. What is interesting is how differently they are marketed and what this says about society's expectation of gender. Women's fragrances are sold on the basis that the wearer will be seen, by others, as a dazzling starlet, perhaps a little like a Paris Hilton (can you even dare to dream?), presumably because all her foul female odour has been covered with Thierry Mugler's Angel. Contrast this with men, who are sold to on the basis of how wearing the product will change how they are seen in the eyes of women. This is especially true if they wear Lynx's new range, Temptation, a chocolate scented deodorant. In actuality, these two scents, Temptation and Angel are practically the same fragrance. They both smell repugnant: artificially sweet with a hint of Play-doh and vomit, but both claim to be chocolate.

So although identical in the inhalation, it is the service that each is sold as providing which differs, though both pray on the paranoia of what each gender is expected to act and smell like. Both the "virginal woman" and the "machismo man" are painfully dim-witted, insulting and repressive constructs with which no right-thinking individual would identify.

What becomes increasingly clear in my mind is how the mass-market scent manufacturers so cleverly sell the societal status quo of gender expectation, presumably because the actual product they are trying to shift is garbage. In exactly the same way as WKD sells itself on the basis that people's inhibitions diminish the more kaylied they become rather than on the delicious and careful blending of ingredients that no doubt make up its cyan coloured liquid-brain-cell-annihilator, the marketing emphasis of the mainstream perfumer is on the societal effect not the personal experience of their product. The moral seems to be that if you can't make something good, sell it to people so that they understand they will be seen as functional, normal members of their social group if they consume it. This has nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with submission to the norm and that applies to people regardless of gender.

On perfume and gender

News of a decline in perfume sales appears to have excited the feminist blogosphere. Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte suggests that "The bell tolls for #5", which, if they ever read feminist blogs, would cause conniptions in the Chanel publicity department, but only on the grounds that she hasn't referred to it correctly as "No. 5". She follows up a piece by Feministing's Miriam, which claims that the decline means "Women might actually want to smell like themselves!"

It's a pity and, I think, a mistake that these bloggers associate perfume with anti-feminism. Miriam alleges that perfume reinforces gender stereotypes: "Women need to smell like florals and fruit, while men need to smell like musk and pine trees." Meanwhile, Amanda opines that "The notion that women are inherently foul and need to be scrubbed and covered up with scent is an idea that’s fading." It's clear, then, that neither blogger knows much about the culture, industry or history of perfume, and that both are blinkered by their American-centric viewpoints.

Whatever one may think of its efforts, the United States of America has undoubtedly achieved greatness on a world stage. And yet I still can't name a single great American perfume, ever. The cliché suggests that American beauty is about dehumanisation and homogenisation, while Europeans are into individuality and earthiness, and unfortunately the cliché holds when talking about scent. Big American producers such as Clinique and Elizabeth Arden chuck out new ersatz fruity florals every year. A huge sector of the market is eaten up by gooey celebrity fragrances, notably those attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt and Elizabeth Taylor. Even the smaller and potentially more interesting houses - I'm thinking of Bond No 9 - tend to come out with nothing but fizz, froth and daiquiris. Even Bond's much-lauded Chinatown smells like something from The Body Shop pretending to be a fruit salad.

From an American perspective, then, perhaps perfume does seem like a way of covering up the "filthy" natural smell of women with flowers and fruit. However, step anywhere out of the United States - even to Canada or Mexico - and you'll quickly realise that the American attitude to perfume as anti-body is far from the norm. Perfume has since its invention been used by men, women and intersexuals alike, and the intention has almost always been to enhance one's natural smell rather than to erase it. Try any reputable old-skool cologne on a sweaty armpit, and you'll notice immediately that the point of the citrus/chypre is to blend with the human odour and bring out its natural spiciness, sweetness and sexiness. If you're American and can't bear not washing for five minutes, Jean-Claude Ellena's compelling Bigarrade Concentrée, from Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, recreates the effect with searing precision.

All the really great European perfumes are based upon challenging, unclean and often distinctly animalic notes. First and foremost, there's the holy trinity of civet, ambergris and musk (none of which can be accused of being clean or unnatural: they are, respectively, cat's bum pus, whale puke and deer spunk). Beyond those, there's the smoky sickliness of tobacco, incense, benzoin and cannabis, the spicy darkness of cinnamon, cumin and coffee, the sharpness of angelica and anise, the full-blown blowsy decadence of wilting jasmine - for both sexes. Think, for example, of Guerlain's Jicky. Marketed to men and women equally since its invention in 1889, it smells of burnt plasticine, tar, chlorine, fleshy bodies and baby sick.

Lest anyone forget, the great European perfumes are all built upon the fragrances of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, whence so many of their ingredients come. None of these places have perfume traditions based around deodorisation or femininity. The rosewaters, musks and vetivers sold in the spice markets of Mombasa or Mumbai are intended for use by any and all sexes, to add an individual edge to your existing smell.

Further does it sadden me that neither Amanda nor Miriam appears to be aware of the feminist history of perfume in the West. When women went out in 1937 wearing Schiaparelli's Shocking, they weren't attempting to efface themselves or scrub clean their dirty lady parts. Rather the opposite. The original Shocking was created, as Sir Ben Kingsley might put it, to smell like a cunt. (Don't bother with the reformulated version: this vagina dentata has been tragically defanged.)

Of course, if your knowledge of perfume starts and ends at Tommy Hilfiger, you're probably going to agree with Amanda and Miriam that the decline in perfume sales represents a feminist victory. I don't think it does, though I'm not lamenting it, either. As long as fewer people are buying the sinus-inflaming likes of Insolence, Angel and Paris Hilton Heiress, I shall be very happy. But the idea that perfume is inherently anti-feminist or anti-woman is an ill-informed slur. Perfume is no more anti-feminist than clothes: some styles are informed by a hatred and/or fetishisation of the female, but plenty are not.

If Amanda and Miriam want to throw out their perfume collections, that is up to them. Meanwhile, I'll be in the corner of the fairtrade café, reading Andrea Dworkin while sitting happily in a cloud of Tabac Blond - created in 1919 to celebrate women's agency and the potency of the suffrage movement. Vive la revolution!